Quote Originally Posted by zerazax View Post
First of all.... new architecture. None of the numbers you read for specs matter, because its their first new architecture since R600

Second, naming wise, things change... when the 7 series comes out, few might even remember what things were once named. It appears AMD/ATI is going back to making powerful single GPU solutions with the Cayman / 6900 series... had AMD never named the 5870X2 the 5970, people wouldnt think as much about it
well it very well may be a new design or arranging the shadders and whatnot but the compute cores in themselves are relatively the same, yes they will be a tad more efficient but that can only make up so much. also if you look at the marketing slides from AMD themselves they show it just above the GTX 460 and below the GTX 470 AMD has always claimed that the 5870 is faster than the GTX 470 so to show the new card below the GTX 470 on a marketing slide points to it being slower than the GTX 470 AND the 5870, which is totally backed up by the specs.

and yes of course naming changes but the move from 4870x2 to the 5970 made perfect sense considering the 5970 is faster than the 5870. this new scheme makes no sense on any level of performance at all.

and to all those who like to beat the crap out of Fermi all day about power usage you know your right it sucks back the power. but it's also a performance animal. and if you think about all the time in a year your gaming at load (because the differences at idle are small) you spend how much more a year on power? maybe like $50 max if you game lots (granted F@H is a different story) the performance difference however from a GTX 480 of the 5870 is well worth it. I own both a 5870 and a GTX 480 and the jump in performance going to the 480 was pretty outrageous even on my CPU bottle neck.

the 6870 will be a strong card don't get me wrong and im sure it will sell well but its nothing special like the move from 4000's to 5000's and the naming is just plain bad...