Quote Originally Posted by Cybercat View Post
I'm not sure anybody with a good head on their shoulders would submit to your logic. Up until the point you mentioned texture and pixel fillrates, you were spot on, and then...I don't know what happened. All that talk about core configurations and average game performance not being indicative of an overall performance picture, and then you go and compare fillrates? Like this is still the DX7 and 8 era?

If fillrates were such an important factor, the 6800 Ultra wouldn't have kept up as well as it did, the 7900GTX should have done at least as well as the X1900XTX (if not better), and the 8800GTX would never have hit the 60%+ improvement over the 2900XT that it often did.

Forget the fillrates, go back to what you were saying about games and drivers and different core configurations. There's too many factors to look at to really even speculate what the performance would be, but the best guesses are the ones that barely even touch fillrates.
The biggest difference between ATI and NVIDIA, the way I see it at least, is that ATI is basing his cards on "logic" sp's, which means that if you are able to make and awesome driver, you get and awesome performance, but if you don't...well, you stick with your reals sp's (160 in RV770, 5 ways each so theorically this makes 800sp's). On the other hand, NVIDIA is not that reliant on drivers as their arquitecture is more "beasty": no logical sp's means that you can improve a few algorythms but that's all...

So, ATI has a long way in order to make the RV870 as efficient as RV770. The only way we are seeing that poor scaling is because of that, they have to improve how the sp's work (in order to keep all of them feeded) and how to manage the new AF which is awesome but is showing as a HUGE problem (compared to older gpus in which AF has been nearly free).

That could also explain why there isn't more difference between 5870 and 5850: the more SP's you have, the more you have to work on a driver so we could say that 5870 is gonna get a lot better than 5850 will (and 5850 is already and awesome product nontheless). Within 6 months time I expect 5870 to totally kill 4870X2 performance wise in ALL games/benchmarks.