Quote Originally Posted by Mechromancer View Post
Only 16 ROPS just like my crappy 2900XT? Performance in today's (non-UT3 engine) games will probably still be mediocre. The R700 will probably PWN in all UT3 based games and newer game engines, though. Nvidia won't be able to keep up in shader intensive game engines this time around I bet. Unfortunately for ATI, there aren't too many of those game engines currently. I think the R700 needs to drastically increase the texture fillrate, compared to the R600, to be competitive.
It depends on what a certain game needs to run well. If it needs a high pixel fill rate, then only having 16 raster operation pipelines (ROPs) will probably be a limitation. If the game requires a high texture fetch rate, then the new RV770 core with 32 TMUs (double that of R600) should provide excellent performance. The R600 and RV670 were already good cards at pure shader limited apps like 3dmark06 and Oblivion. Adding 50% more shaders and increasing the clock speed will only make things better.

The 8800GTX was such a good card because it was so well balanced, equally good at many things. I am hopeful for the RV770, but having the same number of ROPs as the X1800XT does not inspire confidence for applications that require a high pixel fill rate.

Another downfall of the same # of ROPs is the AA /AF performance as well as the post processing capibilities. This was identified as a weakness in the R600 architecture. Unless ATI has figured out a way to do more with 16 ROPs than they did before, this will probably be a weakness again.