Quote Originally Posted by Helmore View Post
Or they will increase the capability and/or efficiency of the shaders in RV870, in which case the shaders will take up more space, but they will perform better than the actual jump in the amount of shaders would suggest. They have to add some extra logic to RV870's shaders anyway to make it compatible with DX11's specs, although I wouldn't be surprised if RV770 is already reasonably close to having all that is needed to support DX11.
RV790 will have the exact same units as used in RV770, but there will simply be more of 'em. Just my guess though, I wouldn't mind to be proven wrong.
I am pretty sure as well that ATI already has most of the additional logic for DX11 from their bid on DX10.1.

I also am pretty confident that at least the efficiency of the shaders will be improved, as they were able to do this in RV670 -> RV770 , which resulted in "smaller" units (more performance per mm^2 comparitively). As far as capability, that is the one that I am unsure of, as they already did some minor tweaks to the shaders to make them more GPGPU "friendly"; though who knows what changes DX11 brings to the table in the GPGPU arena (from a design standpoint).

Back to RV790 though: last time that I checked the "RV790 and RV740 in March 2009" thread, a few people were certain that RV790 would be 55nm, and just a slightly tweaked version of RV770 to yield higher clocks.
But now, you are saying that RV790 will be 40nm like RV740?