I dug up HFR's review of R600 and it was significantly faster than the X1950 XTX in every single benchmark, usually by a lot, except with AA where differences were sometimes small:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/671-11/quake-4-half-life-2-lost-coast.html
Oh, and it was faster than even the 8800 Ultra in Quake 4, for what it's worth.
We are talking about a high end card, the results that interest most are with AA, if only for future proofing reference. Additionally, the Oblivion results on that review are dramatically different than on Anandtech. None of them is playable on Anandtech, while on Hardware FR the HD2900XT is 2.26x faster lol.
On TechReport HD2900XT does a bit better, but nowhere near the 200% faster on Hardware FR. So the Oblivion results on the latter are definitely bogus, so I removed them from the analysis below.
Compiling results from Hardware FR, Anandtech, TechpowerUP, Guru of 3D and TechReport I got:
HardwareFR - 30% faster
Anandtech - 36% faster
TechPowerUp - 16% faster
Guru3D - 25% faster
TechReport - 38% faster
Average - 28% faster
Now lets look at power consumption:
HardwareFR - No info on X1900XTX power consumption to compare
Anandtech - 15% higher
TechPowerUp - 20% higher
Guru3D - No info on X1900XTX power consumption to compare
TechReport - 14% higher
Average - 16.3 % higher
Ok, I'm surprised and must eat some humble pie. I guess G80 was really the factor that made R600 such a disappointment. Otherwise the R600 moment would have been much less noticed. Vega is indeed a bit closer to a R600 moment than I initially thought.
However (in Alan Rickman's voice
), the article I quoted at the beginning has Vega 56 at 25.5% faster than R9 Fury with only a 3% in power consumption, giving a much better delta. Therefore I still do not see it completely as a R600 moment, sorry. But I can see why you think it is.