Quote Originally Posted by AliG View Post
Come to think about it, the r600 could be looked at like the r520. It lost to nvidia's high end, but isn't wasn't made to win, it was made more so as a test to pave the way for the next big bomb they drop on the market.
I'm not entirely sure where you came up with that theory but it's not completely right. Both the R600 and R520 were made to win, the R600 just got blown out of the water though. The R520 was a different story, there ATI had massive delays because of some mistake in their design (which seemed rather easy to fix after they found it though, a major blunder in other words). R520 was supposed to launch alongside NVIDIA's 7800 GTX, it just missed that date by a huge margin. R520 would have been competitive with NVIDIA if it would have been launched around that time, it just didn't happen. R580 was launched just the way they planned it, which seemed early for us as R520 was just entering the market, but there were no delays for R580 and there was enough reason to launch it even though it would give R520 a short lifespan.
R600 was just failure compared to NVIDIA, R600 did as ATI expected it to but NVIDIA just did way better than ATI expected.
But all this is of coarse a bit off-topic.