Originally Posted by
tajoh111
I entirely agree, which is why if I buy a card this generation, it will likely be a cayman card. The best NV can do at the moment is reduce power consumption so that they can make a full gtx 512 with more TMUs(and the best this can do is match cayman). They might have added more shaders, but rumors are saying otherwise.
Nvidia fermi chip needs a huge redesign. If they can keep the performance but knock off 33% power consumption I would be happier than a 25% faster, 15 percent power increase. Fermi should never consume more power than a 5970 and well it does, which to me, simply shocks me considering its significantly slower and crap out at high resolutions even though it has more vram. They need to scale down power someway so this architecture has legs. Because trying to scale up when your limited by power and heat, just limited how fast the chip is and it stops the architecture from getting more complex and denser which is noeded for the future. 33% is pretty much impossible unless they improve their shader efficiency vastly and reduce the size of a chip. It would almost take a miracle to get done since fermi was design to be a cgpu more than anything else. At this point, Nvidia can't have everything, they cannot have a great cGPu architecture and a great gaming architecture, doing both makes the chips larger than they are and decreases efficiency of the shader in games. Nvidia needs to either focus on gaming or make two separate architectures if they want to get competitive on die size/performance per watt with AMD.