Are you saying that TSMC is directly responsible for two companies who use varying designs and perf ethos?
It's BS, but I wish I could give you an up-vote for 'perf ethos'.
Are you saying that AMD couldn't run the 7970 @ 1GHz from the word go, when everyone else seems to be able to anyway?
Dave has addressed this: they were unsure about the bin spread of the 28nm process and decided to be relatively conservative during silicon qual. That's completely defendable. Especially since, at the time, there were probably justified in assuming that a 256-bit 300mm2 GK104 would not beat them in gaming performance.
Or that TMSC are responsible for AMD having put a load of compute stuff into their gaming part, and we got 32 ROPs instead of 48/64.
By how much do you think, average performance will go up if they had used 48 instead of 32 ROPs? 5%? Don't think it's going to be much more than that, but let's put it generously at 10%. So you're whining that a GTX670 is
only 100% faster than a power hogging 4870X2, but suddenly a 10% difference is a big deal?
Or NV releasing a part thats *just* enough to compete, when BigK seems to be ready, but not needed.
I don't know where you get your info, but I haven't seen anything about it being ready. All I've seen is an announcement. And a release target sometime Q4.
The last couple of pages of this thread have been about the supposed NV supply issues being nonsense, ...
Kindly do the effort and reread: the last couple of page were about the yield issues being nonsense. The lack of wafer allocation is not in dispute, quite on the contrary.
... so lets agree that TSMC doenst have any major crippling issues that could stop either company releasing a more powerful card.
You obviously missed my point: in this generation, it's clear that both of them have similar perf/mm2 and perf/W, especially after discounting the compute related overhead of Tahiti. This should tell you something: at the very core, AMD and Nvidia depend on process technology to dramatically advance performance. Not the 10% stuff, but the major steps forward. Given enough time, I'm sure Nvidia and AMD could improve perf/W and perf/mm2 by some amount for the same process, but the very fact that they are so similar shows that they're both scraping at the bottom of the barrel. Conclusion: from a bird-eye point of view, they are restricted by the speed at which TSMC innovates and introduces new technology.
Once you accept this point, the only thing that matters how both companies decide to sprinkle their roadmap with silicon versions. That's marketing at work for you. A delicate balance of trading of features (perf) vs. cost (die size) vs. price points.
No, I'm blaming AMD/NVidia for doing "just enough". Which seems to work, granted, cos people buy their cards.
With constraints above, all you're complaining about is that both Nvidia and AMD dared to create a die that wasn't die enough to your liking. Well, tough.
Or, you know, Crysis and Metro2033, which run at ~15fps 2560x1600 with AA on the 4870x2 and ~30fps on the 670. 100% improvement. Still fairly unplayable.
For all the examples you can give of games running at 15fps now running at 30pfs, I can give many more that went from 25fps to 50fps. IOW: from unplayable to very playable. But you knew that, right?