New rumor about ATI Southern Islands

[saaya]

The 5870 in some games where ATI is favoured already bests the 480.
Since SI strengthens the weakest areas of 5 series performance and also includes a more efficient 4 shader model (and more of them) with a higher memory amount AND bandwidth (as well as more tesselation modules) then it's not very likely that the 6870 will be anything less than the 480 in the worst case scenario.

Definitely faster.

well... on average a 480 IS faster than a 5870, and its at least 10%, last i checked it was around 15% iirc...

and we dont know how well ati tweaked the core and if it really gives a steady boost across the board... i agree, its likely that they wont settle for anything less than 480 performance... but im not sure if they will be fast enough to really beat the 480, as in enabling settings and resolutions the 480 cant...

For some reason, I think this is more about pricing than anything. It would seem too screwed up if the 6850 never caught up to the 5870 when there is only a 15 percent between the 5850 and the 5870. It would have to be like only 10% faster and to call that a 6850 would be shameful and misleading.

It would kind of mirror what NV has done with gtx 285 and gtx 275 those and could simply be a super minor update.

But only 10% difference. This could be fake and all but considering the timing of this lineup and the obvious flaws found in some of the benchmarks results, this appears to be more genuine.

well, despite the fake stuff chiphell has posted in the past i still trust them more than that weird chinese website that leaked those very high benchmark results... and hey, you know me, if i have to chose between optimistic and pessimistic rumors, which one do you think ill go for? ^^

jokes aside, i think the chiphell table makes a lot more sense than the numbers leaked by that other site... seems more realistic... im not saying i believe them... i still have my fingers crossed for bart reaching 5850 performance...