AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[Lightman]

i will wait for the 15th so that we can figure out exactly what this whole power tune AM/FM radio switch power saving maybe turbo boost stuff is. because for AMD to have the card set to a TDP and raise or lower clocks to stay within that limit would be nothing short of pure stupidity. considering most people who buy this card have no interest in OCing and know little more then how to plug in a stick of RAM let alone do research to find out that to get the most performance out of their brand new $400+ video card they need to hit some stupid switch. I appreciate AMD trying to make the card as efficient as possible but at the cost of performance like that is way to far over the line...

So why you're not complaining about GTX580 throttling in Furmark then? Apparently it is limiting performance in that excellent game by quite a margin.

Look at this feature from different angle -> Perlin noise from Vantage takes the HD5870 almost as high as Furmark does. This new Power Tune undoubtedly will affect games performance very slightly in very specific conditions only or not at all. I have not come across a game which would put similar load on GPU as Perlin Noise or Furmark at all (be assured I've tested quite a lot of them when my HD5870 was fresh).
The good thing about this tech is that it is microcontroller based and not dependant on profiles.
I can set my card power to be -20% and when playing older/less demanding games my card will take care of staying at reasonable power use while still delivering outstanding performance.
Imagine a situation where you have card X with sustained gaming power 200W and card Y with variable power of 100-200W. Now you start Quake III TA with no vSync so you can fragg better. Card X will draw 200W and give you 2500FPS and on card Y while might reach 2500FPS @200W you prefer to save 100W and be happy with only 1500FPS. The side effect of that power saving will of course be lower noise as well.

So instead of spinning new power features as bad thing try to look at them from different angle