Quote Originally Posted by tajoh111 View Post
That what I thought about the gtx 480. In the end, it only got 3 or 4%. It was 14% faster than a 5870 initially and is now maybe a few points better than that.

For driver improvement I will try to be hopeful because I still can't see AMD screwing up this badly, but reality probably says for a single card, maybe 5% at best and that is not going to happen overnight.
You gave your own evidence for driver improvments. How did the GTX 480 go from 15-20% faster than the 5870 at launch to less than that since then? And that's including the fact more Nvidia friendly titles have been released since (e.g. LP2, HAWX2).

Hint: the 5870 got some major boosts

Quote Originally Posted by Bigchrome View Post
For the people waiting on drivers to fix the performance, we're still waiting on those for the 2900xt aswell!

These cards are decent enough to make me question purchasing a GTX570, which I wanted really badly up until this morning. Now I'm wondering if the extra memory and maybe a little better performance is worth losing folding power and display capabilites for. Seriously tough decision
Big difference is that the 2900XT's were quickly shelved/forgotten... they were around only 6 months.

Biggest evidence for driver changes is the fact that 69xx performance ranges everywhere from well above 5870 to only 5870 and occasionally below. Methinks the change from VLIW5->VLIW4 is a big issue, because code has been so heavily optimized for VLIW5 since 4800's AND 5800's have been using it. Makes no sense for 384 SIMD card to be less than 320 SIMD unless there's some issues with compiling vector instructions

See: 5870 release scores/benches (below 4870X2 performance) to today's #'s (just 10-20% below the 480/570 depending on the review you look at).

Also, what display capabilities are you looking for? If you're going single card, there isn't much display wise the 570's can do the 69xx's cant at this point