Yep, mapel said that if Nvidia would have brought a 580 successor with 7970 performance people would call it a joke.
I said (after being corrected on context), that if they had done that with the same improved power consumption, nobody would. You said, you would have done anyway, so my assumption that nobody would is wrong - proven by you!
Nevertheless, I stand by what I've said. I for one would most certainly not have called it a joke and there's plenty of other points to this argument.
7970 is the 6970s successor and it is on some of the reviews it's a little more than 30% percent - especially in the resolution that matters most to me. Then there's GPU Compute where 7970 simply walks all over 6970. Plus it adds quite a bit on the image quality front. Plus it's got more quiet cooling (reference designs compared). And all of this in the same ballpark of energy consumption.
Oh - and did I mention that we're talking about an actual product, not some hypothesis.
AMD has executed very well here and they did swallow the bitter pill of investing in GPU compute this round, which does not immediately net you returns on the gaming front - something Nvidia has done since GT200 and paid the price in the form of large die sizes. When taking this into account, you really cannot compare AMDs to Nvidias situation. And I will gladly applaud Nvidia as well, when they up the image quality likewise, add an eyefinity-like technique to Kepler, stay within the same power envelope (<225 watts that is) and beat GTX 580 on all fronts with 30 - 40 percent margin. At the very least such a product will drive down the prices of 7970 AMD is able to command for one reason only: because they were first.
So, you can nay-say all you want, 7970 is a very well rounded product. And if Nvidia is going to beat it by 30% (as they now have to in order to have a comparable situation), then I am going to be fine with that as well.
