Quote Originally Posted by Chumbucket843 View Post
there is more going on than sp's and memory bandwidth.

for a long time it has been a mystery as to why the 5870 was only 60% faster than the 4890 while doubling almost everything. then the card was still liked because nvidia could barely beat their previous gen, and everyone stopped talking about why it wasnt much faster.

perhaps whatever bottleneck(s) the 5870 had has been improved in SI.
There was a talk/rumor that the efficiency of their execution unit block(superscalar and five ALUs wide) is not that stellar so that they worked on improving that part of the design.