5870 Bottleneck Investigation (CPU and/or Memory Bandwidth)

[hurleybird]

First of all, that's just the number of compute threads possible, and has nothing to do with limiting the shader power in games. Secondly, the 5870 can only run a maximum of 1600 / 5 = 320 threads, because you can only run one thread per group of 5 "stream processors", so in terms of DirectCompute even TriFire 5870's will not be held back by the thread limit, although QuadFire might be.