The ATI Radeon 5XXX Thread

[Calmatory]

So how do you explain HD4800 vs. G200?

What needs explanation? Nvidia being surprised of RV770's 800 SPs? No way. People working on the field for over 15 years for sure know about pads and the limitations they yield for small chips. So no, they were aware that 480 SPs core would be padlimited if using 256-bit bus, they had to expect more.

What could Nvidia have done better? They made as great perf/mm² GPU as they could. They would have stripped the GPU down to bare minimum in size if they just could without sacrificing the performance. Actually GT200 would have been even better in terms of perf/mm² if they had used GDDR5, but for reason or another they did not. Maybe costs/availability, or the high power consumption.

They did overprice their GPUs to milk. The only thing which probably surprised was AMD's aggressive pricing. Not the RV770 chip itself. I remind, they have people working there who have been designing the GPU architectures for some 15 years, if not more. I refuse to believe that random chaps on forums could come up with better guesses/explanations than those people with their expertise.