Quote Originally Posted by trinibwoy View Post
What strawmen? You're the one making sweeping assumptions. I just chose not to counter them with my own unfounded predictions. You never explained why you think there are big driver improvements to be had on Cypress even though the architecture barely changed.
32nm is a strawman. I said nothing of the sort. As for my assumptions, I wouldn't say they are unfounded. They are founded on the little bits of information that we have at the moment. Certainly nothing strong like "I have an NDA", but it's still fun to speculate. You don't have to participate if you don't want to.

As for driver improvements, it's just a suspicion of mine. That a chip with the same number of shaders, higher clocks, and higher bandwidth would consistently score lower then a 4870x2 (much less 4890CF) even though it doesn't have to interface through CF doesn't seem right. You keep mentioning a barely changed architecture - then where does the performance discrepancy come from?

That's because I didn't. Mario did and you did as well.
A quick review shows that Marios did mention it, but nobody picked up on it. I certainly didn't mention GTX285 SLI until after you did. Double the speed of GTX285 =/= GTX285 SLI. All the other discussion revolved around GTX295.

Except the GTX280 wasn't 40% faster than the HD4870 and was quite a bit slower than the 4870X2.
Like I said, that's my optimistic (for NV) view. If you don't like it I could present my doom and gloom view.

Personally I think you guys are the ones being more pessimistic (or sandbagging). I think Fermi will be significantly faster then GTX295. If it isn't it'd be a disaster, imo.