Quote Originally Posted by trinibwoy View Post
I must have missed where that comment was directed at you. It wasn't a reply to one of your posts was it?
It's pretty clear in context whose ideas you were mocking.

Yes, as has always been the case. I wouldn't bet on any sort of multi-GPU Fermi at this point. It also remains to be seen if one will even be necessary (or feasible).
I wouldn't bank on a multi-gpu fermi until a refresh. But Nvidia has claimed there would be a multi-gpu version, without stating any sort of timeframe.

We're talking in circles here - one minute you're saying Cypress will benefit from driver improvements, now you're saying Cypress drivers are stable (which is what I said in the first place).
I'm saying that there will be more improvement possible in fermi drivers then evergreen drivers. I'm not saying that there will be no improvement in evergreen drivers at all. Software development is a process. There is rarely a case where a piece of software is bug free or as optimized as it could be. Also the hardware did change a little between generations, even if it's not as obvious as things like shader count. Latencies change, the memory controller and scheduler are tweaked, etc. Between now and when fermi is released, and beyond, the drivers will continue being developed to take advantage of those arch tweaks, fix bugs, etc. It would be unusual for for development to just stop and make no improvements/fixes from this point forward.

In terms of your optimism for Fermi I believe you're referring to it needing to beat the GTX295 or else it'll be a failure. That's not an optimistic view, it's simply setting the low watermark against which Fermi will be judged on release. Personally, I think GTX 295 is far too low of a benchmark.
I'm not the one that introduced the idea of being barely faster then a 295 is enough. I always assumed it would be significantly faster.

My optimistic view is 40% faster then evergreen with perfect hardware/driver execution. Pessimistic would be a little faster then 295 with some sort of problem that needs a respin, board revision, or several driver versions to fix (it's a complex new arch, don't say it's not possible). Realistically I'd say 30% faster then 5870 with some minor growing pains.

Since you like computerbase so much I figured I'd share these graphs from the same review with everybody: