Quote Originally Posted by bill_d View Post
not if they need a complete driver rewrite to show it at it's best, they get one shot at a launch most sites don't review a second time for new drivers
They only need the driver rewrite if it doesn't performs as high as they wanted. That is, beating a gtx 580.

From a hardware perspective, I think the 6970 has the innards of a card that can beat a gtx 580. But it isn't going to be super easy and I think the delayed launch meant that it might have not won that battle and drivers are going through heavy revisions to get it to that level.

From how a few reliable rumors leakers from AMD side were going on, it seemed like AMD could have released the 6970 the same week as NV released the gtx 580. Something tells me AMD delayed it because the card probably beat a gtx 480 but not a gtx 580.