Quote Originally Posted by Scimitar View Post
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.
Wow...

First games don't "need" a higher pixel fillrate, that is dependent on the resolution, obviously.
I also don't know if I would call G80 balanced...
Also this whole, R600's downfall is the ROPs and broken AA is BS. There seems to be a larger hit from AF, which is why AMD/ATi is doubling the texture units, than there is from AA.
16 ROPs will not hurt the RV770 at all, they simply need to do a little tweaking, like doubling the Z per clock from 2x to 4x, and things should be fine.