I wouldn't call it an issue just AMD trying to appeal too a niche market of power friendly users which is something as stated by other members here is something they look for.Originally Posted by highoctane
Smart move imo, but Im with you on the confusion this is creating.
3 more days
What's funny is that for the last 3 years, when AMD was content with their high end single GPU being 15-25% slower than the Nvidia single GPU, everyone was saying AMD was doomed. Now that AMD is possibly only 5-10% slower if not matching in some scenarios, it's doom and gloom for AMD.
------------------------
My analysis of all the reviews
Going off these 3dMark feature scores:
http://h-5.abload.de/img/69704mxh.jpg
The 6970 trounces the 5870 in everything, except Perlin Noise. Taking a look at Perlin Noise, which is a score reflecting shader power, we get:
5870: 175.42
6970: 146.02
Thus, 6970 is just 83.24% of the 5870's power in shaders. Now why is this significant?
As I wrote before, 5870 is VLIW-5 which is (w,x,y,z,t) where t is the transcendental unit. 6970 is now VLIW-4 which is (w,x,y,z) with 3 of the 4 shaders being used to calculate a transcendental.
Now, why the big gap in Perlin Noise if VLIW-4 Cayman has 384 SIMDs and Cypress has 320 SIMDs?
Well first, 1536 is 96% of the 1600 shaders that Cypress has assuming all shaders are firing. However, that doesn't account for the 83% gap. Two possibilities:
a) The VLIW-4 compiler isn't doing as great a job yet, in which case drivers and optimizations may improve performance
or
b) 3dMark uses a lot of transcendentals, and hence Cayman isn't able to take advantage of the complex t-unit and is getting a performance decrease
So either way you look at it, the 6970 still has room for improvement with regards to 3dMark by improving the compiler and/or optimizing the 3dMark code for VLIW-4. Thus, at this time, 3dMark is not very indicative of actual in game 6970 performance.
(Besides, look at 5870 scores in Vantage at release and today... it's a whopping increase over a year of driver optimizations for a synthetic. Cayman should get even more seeing as how it is a different architecture)
So what's all this mean?
Well, I've been saying it for some time now, but I can see in-game performance putting the 6970 ~GTX 580 levels and the 6950 ~GTX570 levels. The key is that the 69xx improvement over Cypress will range greatly - and hence your perspective of how good the card is may differ.
One of the key things from the release of the GTX 480 and now 580 is that in some games, Nvidia has a whopping lead, and in others, the 5870 barely trails or even takes the lead. That's because Fermi's architecture enabled it to take advantage of certain games far better than the 5870 (esp. in some DX11 tessellation), whereas in others, the 5870's pure shader and texturing advantages bring it close.
However, this creates a wide variation in performance figures - some say Cypress trails only 15%, others say it trails 30%, etc. from the 480. What will be interesting to see is how "stable" Cayman performs relative to the GTX 580/570 - in other words, in games where Cypress trails heavily, does Cayman get a considerable boost over Cypress showing that Cayman is truly different from Cypress? We've seen from the Stalker benchmark, Cayman does get a 33% boost over Cypress so it's quite possible.
IMO this is what we'll see:
6970 will be anywhere from 10 to 50% faster than the 5870 based upon the game - in heavily tessellated games the lead should increase, in games with heavy shaders and little tessellation the lead is probably lower. 6970 should be close though probably trail to the GTX 580 in quite a few games overall though, and show less variation in performance relative to the 580 than the 5870 did. Likewise, in situations were CF doesn't scale well and/or tessellation is heavier (where the 5870 is weak), the 6970 might be very close to the 5970 but in other games, it will trail heavily.
My own hypothesis: Games where Cayman barely improves on 5870 are games with low-to-none tessellation and are heavily shader bound. These will also be games where the 5870 is really really close to the 480/580. Games where Cayman pulls far ahead of 5870 are games with higher levels of tessellation and/or less shader bound. DX11 titles and titles using heavy DXCompute features as well.
That's my assessment of the situation, and why so many people were giving doom and gloom when certain benchmarks were showing Cayman barely edging Cypress (3dMark and some older games), whereas in other benchmarks (such as Unigine Heaven, ComputeMark, Stalker etc.), the 6970 seems to beat the 5870 handily (and often gets close to the 5970).
Stalker COP:
Metro2033:
http://www.hardwareluxx.de/community...-post1363.html
What'll be interesting to see is what games the reviewers use to compare. If they use games that are heavily 5870 favored, Cayman might not look great - however, if they show games where the 5870 struggled and 480/580 excelled, its possible Cayman looks amazing. Of course, this will show who's biased to who...
TL;dr - 3dMark and other benches are optimized for VLIW-5 and VLIW-4 isn't optimized yet, and so 3dMark isnt representative of Cayman performance yet. Where Cayman will shine and probably pull ahead is in DX11 games where DirectCompute and Tessellation is necessary. Ultimately, the suite/games tested will determine whether the 6970 looks like a big improvement. What's most important though is comparing it to the 480/580/570 and seeing if it is a more consistent performer relative to those cards than the 5870.
Oh and Antilles will be a beast
Last edited by zerazax; 12-12-2010 at 05:55 PM.
If gouging is true, looks like it might be $299 for 6950 and $399 for 6970 when it's out. Though shopblt is not NCIX, NCIX had their GTX 570 at $411 then it was dropped to $359 on release date.
Metro 2033 results
http://www.hardwareluxx.de/community...-post1363.html
~11 fps for 5870, ~23fps for 6970
With these prices and the same or less then the 570GTX now that's a big FAIL in my bookIt could price gouging or depending on the real review benchmark the price might not be fail. I think some people like to use the fail way to often.
For example the same site has eight GTX 580 listed at $527 up to $558, NONE in stock.
The lowest priced GTX 580 at $527 is priced 17.6% higher than the $448 HD 6970
My speculation, if for example the HD 6970 is on average 10% slower than GTX 580 than the HD 6970 at $448 is not to bad price or fail.
Anyway TheBreezyBB is the same person who couple days ago posted about sinking ship, so I don't take his posting too seriously.
Anyway why not wait for the real reviews before all the fail, gloom & doom postings.
Last edited by Heinz68; 12-12-2010 at 06:05 PM. Reason: typing error
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For the performance of the 6970 cant complain about the price, compare to the 580s!! Only few more days to see some legit reviews/screenys..!
Another thing I find funny is AMD/Intel would snipe any of our Moms on a grocery run if it meant good quarterly results, and you are forever whining about what feser did?
And yet again, that is roughly at the MSRP that I heard two months ago.
I guess we will have to wait for reviews to be 100% sure but I haven't heard any changes from the $449/$349 MSRPs.
Originally Posted by motown_steve
Every genocide that was committed during the 20th century has been preceded by the disarmament of the target population. Once the government outlaws your guns your life becomes a luxury afforded to you by the state. You become a tool to benefit the state. Should you cease to benefit the state or even worse become an annoyance or even a hindrance to the state then your life becomes more trouble than it is worth.
Once the government outlaws your guns your life is forfeit. You're already dead, it's just a question of when they are going to get around to you.
You may be right, the 6870 is $249 so it might not be appropriate for the 6950 to be priced at $299.
for a 5770 replacment the 6800's are a little high
Uh... how many times do we have to go over this, they replace Cypress.
Originally Posted by motown_steve
Every genocide that was committed during the 20th century has been preceded by the disarmament of the target population. Once the government outlaws your guns your life becomes a luxury afforded to you by the state. You become a tool to benefit the state. Should you cease to benefit the state or even worse become an annoyance or even a hindrance to the state then your life becomes more trouble than it is worth.
Once the government outlaws your guns your life is forfeit. You're already dead, it's just a question of when they are going to get around to you.
if they replace Cypress where is the 3 and 4 way cf
Cypress was not a mid range card the 6870 is
Cypress performance for a midrange price...
Originally Posted by motown_steve
Every genocide that was committed during the 20th century has been preceded by the disarmament of the target population. Once the government outlaws your guns your life becomes a luxury afforded to you by the state. You become a tool to benefit the state. Should you cease to benefit the state or even worse become an annoyance or even a hindrance to the state then your life becomes more trouble than it is worth.
Once the government outlaws your guns your life is forfeit. You're already dead, it's just a question of when they are going to get around to you.
Posted 3 weeks ago...
I think there are extra slides that lots of people had not seen before including me:
lol how can so many components be so much faster and improved yet the card is in between the 570 and 580 at best. Go figure... good night folks
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What's funny is that for the last 3 years, when AMD was content with their high end single GPU being 15-25% slower than the Nvidia single GPU, everyone was saying AMD was doomed. Now that AMD is possibly only 5-10% slower if not matching in some scenarios, it's doom and gloom for AMD.
------------------------
My analysis of all the reviews
Going off these 3dMark feature scores:
http://h-5.abload.de/img/69704mxh.jpg
The 6970 trounces the 5870 in everything, except Perlin Noise. Taking a look at Perlin Noise, which is a score reflecting shader power, we get:
5870: 175.42
6970: 146.02
Thus, 6970 is just 83.24% of the 5870's power in shaders. Now why is this significant?
As I wrote before, 5870 is VLIW-5 which is (w,x,y,z,t) where t is the transcendental unit. 6970 is now VLIW-4 which is (w,x,y,z) with 3 of the 4 shaders being used to calculate a transcendental.
Now, why the big gap in Perlin Noise if VLIW-4 Cayman has 384 SIMDs and Cypress has 320 SIMDs?
Well first, 1536 is 96% of the 1600 shaders that Cypress has assuming all shaders are firing. However, that doesn't account for the 83% gap. Two possibilities:
a) The VLIW-4 compiler isn't doing as great a job yet, in which case drivers and optimizations may improve performance
or
b) 3dMark uses a lot of transcendentals, and hence Cayman isn't able to take advantage of the complex t-unit and is getting a performance decrease
So either way you look at it, the 6970 still has room for improvement with regards to 3dMark by improving the compiler and/or optimizing the 3dMark code for VLIW-4. Thus, at this time, 3dMark is not very indicative of actual in game 6970 performance.
(Besides, look at 5870 scores in Vantage at release and today... it's a whopping increase over a year of driver optimizations for a synthetic. Cayman should get even more seeing as how it is a different architecture)
So what's all this mean?
Well, I've been saying it for some time now, but I can see in-game performance putting the 6970 ~GTX 580 levels and the 6950 ~GTX570 levels. The key is that the 69xx improvement over Cypress will range greatly - and hence your perspective of how good the card is may differ.
One of the key things from the release of the GTX 480 and now 580 is that in some games, Nvidia has a whopping lead, and in others, the 5870 barely trails or even takes the lead. That's because Fermi's architecture enabled it to take advantage of certain games far better than the 5870 (esp. in some DX11 tessellation), whereas in others, the 5870's pure shader and texturing advantages bring it close.
However, this creates a wide variation in performance figures - some say Cypress trails only 15%, others say it trails 30%, etc. from the 480. What will be interesting to see is how "stable" Cayman performs relative to the GTX 580/570 - in other words, in games where Cypress trails heavily, does Cayman get a considerable boost over Cypress showing that Cayman is truly different from Cypress? We've seen from the Stalker benchmark, Cayman does get a 33% boost over Cypress so it's quite possible.
IMO this is what we'll see:
6970 will be anywhere from 10 to 50% faster than the 5870 based upon the game - in heavily tessellated games the lead should increase, in games with heavy shaders and little tessellation the lead is probably lower. 6970 should be close though probably trail to the GTX 580 in quite a few games overall though, and show less variation in performance relative to the 580 than the 5870 did. Likewise, in situations were CF doesn't scale well and/or tessellation is heavier (where the 5870 is weak), the 6970 might be very close to the 5970 but in other games, it will trail heavily.
My own hypothesis: Games where Cayman barely improves on 5870 are games with low-to-none tessellation and are heavily shader bound. These will also be games where the 5870 is really really close to the 480/580. Games where Cayman pulls far ahead of 5870 are games with higher levels of tessellation and/or less shader bound. DX11 titles and titles using heavy DXCompute features as well.
That's my assessment of the situation, and why so many people were giving doom and gloom when certain benchmarks were showing Cayman barely edging Cypress (3dMark and some older games), whereas in other benchmarks (such as Unigine Heaven, ComputeMark, Stalker etc.), the 6970 seems to beat the 5870 handily (and often gets close to the 5970).
Stalker COP:
Metro2033:
http://www.hardwareluxx.de/community...-post1363.html
What'll be interesting to see is what games the reviewers use to compare. If they use games that are heavily 5870 favored, Cayman might not look great - however, if they show games where the 5870 struggled and 480/580 excelled, its possible Cayman looks amazing. Of course, this will show who's biased to who...
TL;dr - 3dMark and other benches are optimized for VLIW-5 and VLIW-4 isn't optimized yet, and so 3dMark isnt representative of Cayman performance yet. Where Cayman will shine and probably pull ahead is in DX11 games where DirectCompute and Tessellation is necessary. Ultimately, the suite/games tested will determine whether the 6970 looks like a big improvement. What's most important though is comparing it to the 480/580/570 and seeing if it is a more consistent performer relative to those cards than the 5870.
Oh and Antilles will be a beast
awesome read
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They updated it with Lost Planet 2 and Dirt 2 (look at the major min fps change)
Also he tested Metro 2033 w/o DOF and the avg fps is ~32 fps
Around 30% faster than the 5870 definitely puts it in between the 570 and 580 for gaming, and corresponds with the 15% faster than GTX 480 slide
Come on, try to be objective to some extent and not illogical. Rounding 27.7 up to 30% is pretty significant and not taking into account that Metro 2033 score is bolstering things up(117) big time with only 7 gaming benchmarks(with no min and max) and doesn't represent a realworld practical setting because both cards are rendering the game unplayable at that setting. It is likely both cards are hitting a memory bottleneck and the 5870 is taking it harder. That average is decreased 10-11% if we take it out of the equation.
They updated it with Lost Planet 2 and Dirt 2 (look at the major min fps change
Also he tested Metro 2033 w/o DOF and the avg fps is ~32 fps
Around 30% faster than the 5870 definitely puts it in between the 570 and 580 for gaming, and corresponds with the 15% faster than GTX 480 slide
Any card can look ridiculous powerful once you start playing both games at unplayable settings, as one will barely run because of a memory bottleneck or another bottleneck.
I can still see a 6970 being faster than 18%(and I expect it) better than a 5870, but not the way your accounting(really really spinning it) the evidence. I think reviews will be substantially better than these results, but atleast with this evidence, I wouldn't say cayman xt is 30 percent faster yet.
Look at the chart below.
With DOF on like the person here. Look at the frame rates when DOF is on in the 1gb 5870 it cut down really really badly.
Last edited by tajoh111; 12-13-2010 at 01:49 AM.
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Thanks for summing that up zerazax! With latest numbers from harry97 ,it looks like 6970 will just slightly trail 580GTX in gaming,by ~5% or so,which can be addressed with non-reference (factory OC) models coming from partners. With the same number of stream processors,more SIMD engines and much improved front end and back end,Cayman is a very fine piece of engineering work. I hope with the new PowerPlay there is still some room for improvement though.
Hmm trails 580 by 5-10% ..... ahead of 570 by 5-10% 50$ cheaper than 580 100$ more than 570 , its like there is a card for every budget :P but really spend 350$ and get 1 570 and if you are rich get 2 if you are not so rich get 1 570 and spend the rest on dates
naked 6970
Q6600 (400x9) 2GB DDR2-1000 Asus P5K-E WIFI 2xRadeon HD 4850
As far as heatsinks go, i find this one particularly attractive for some reason. Also its kind of strange to see what might be an actually decent thermal paste application by a videocard company. Usually its just lathered on leaking from the chip spot, but this looks just about right.naked 6970
Core i7 920@ 4.66ghz(H2O)
6gb OCZ platinum
4870x2 + 4890 in Trifire
2*640 WD Blacks
750GB Seagate.
69xx series = 58xx series tuned for dx11 games, well done ATI and right on time, ready for the next shrink to increase size (SP amount) and performance again while nv needs the shrink to reduce size and keep power controll.
looking at dx11 games it will be right on par with the 580gtx performance give or take a few fps. Smaller size and lower power then nv with lower price tag.
Although it doesn't take the single card performance crown... which has never been the goal (although many people always look that way, certainly all the nv fanboys) it looks like a decent future card.
size of the chip ???? antilles performance? who has 2 6950
Last edited by duploxxx; 12-13-2010 at 12:51 AM.
Phase shoke (CPL) controlled by Volterra.naked 6970
Sweet looking bit of hardware that.... looks quality !!
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