Radeon HD 6850 & 6870 reviews...

[DilTech]

didnt you also see the 400s have worse efficiency than the 200s in practically every way for gaming? its only because they were on a new node that it was better than before. if they shrunk the 200 series onto 40nm it would have been like a 460 from the start, without the same yield issues, and 6 months earlier.

an architecture change that offers a atlesat 20% better perf per mm2, and 10-20% better perf per watt, is a very good upgrade. you seem to be stuck on the naming or the price, both of which have zero to do with the architecture and everything to do with simple management choices set for certain reasons they decided on.

.... the gtx 460 1gb used less power than even the GTX 260. It actually uses less than the radeon 4850(and doubles it easily in performance a lot of the time). The GTX 470 and 480's issue had nothing to do with what it can do for gaming and everything to do with the amount of transistors they had to add for those workstation type improvements. That's why the GTX 460 does what it does, they took those changes out of it.

This is exactly my point. We have practically always seen a scenario where a current gen high end is matched by a next-gen mid-range. This is one of the VERY few times that hasn't been the case, THIS is why I'm not impressed. No arguing about power consumption, or "oh it's a smaller die on the same node" is going to matter to me one bit, because in the end they sacrificed performance to make that happen.

Now, does anyone have something logical to add to this discussion?