Quote Originally Posted by Dimitriman View Post
ye we can tell ourselves that but how many times before this much info has converged right before release and turned out to be wrong? almost never.
info leaks at this point are 80% true and if several sources are leaking 1600 shaders and gtx570 performance, thats whats likely to come. And talking about synthetics, if we looked at vantage alone I would ignore it but all benchmarks show similar results. When was the last time a card from any camp did mediocre in synthetics and awesome in games? There may be a difference, but it is often not so substantial that would put the card in a different level.
I think at this point wishing for magic drivers and miracle game performance is straight up denial or wishful thinking. Were looking at a competitor for the 570 and thats the truth. 580 will reign supreme as single chip and Amd will throw antilles against it but it will not be as attractive as 5970 was one year ago. Back then it had no competition so people cared less about xfire issues. It will not be the case this time. Many will still take the 580 over antilles for being single chip.

/end rant

and this coming from an Amd customer since 2007
If you are so confident about the price/performance info we have at the moment don't let me stop you from deciding to buy or not right now. I'm not saying that the info is necessarily right or wrong - only that it is probabilistic, not hard facts.

I don't believe in the magic drivers theory. Being a new architecture there may indeed be some significant driver improvements eventually. But that generally takes months to materialize. As for a differential performance increase in synthetics vs games, I hypothesized such a difference over 2000 posts ago based solely on the transition between 5D and 4D shaders. There are plenty of reasons why that analysis might be very wrong. But writing it off on the basis of not having happened before is a simple logical fallacy. As for the rest I am simply saying we don't have the whole picture. How do they clock? How do they perform in HPC apps? How do they perform in the specific games you play? These are open questions that could affect the purchasing decisions of many people here.

I must admit I would be disappointed if the benchmarks so far are indicative of overall performance in everything. But that's a flaw in my expectations, not a rational analysis.

I have been an ATI customer on and off since, IIRC, 1993. I don't see how that's relevant.