I'm not some knee-jerk Charlie hater like some of the people around here. I realize that he sometimes gets thing right and sometimes wrong. But I'm not just going to take his word on it. Doing so would be foolish, imo. We don't know about any of the test details of the numbers Charlie gave, even if they are right.
If it's only 10-20% faster then Nvidia is in trouble. That's well within reach of the 1Ghz 5870 cards that are being released and will probably be available in volume before Fermi is even released.
It's not like last gen where 4890 was released much later and still couldn't match a 285. Instead you'd have a situation where the top single GPU NV card is matched in performance by something that came out before it did. That would be much worse then last gen for NV.
And that's just talking partner OCed 5870s that we already know are coming out. ATI could start binning or do a respin and introduce even faster 5890s.
In Unigine there appear to be sequences where the 480 is ~60% faster then a 5870. That is a very significant lead. But Unigine Heaven is a highly contrived scenario with lots of tessellation and not much shaders. Performance in more tess/shader balanced scenarios remains to be seen, not to mention realistic AA/AF settings.
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