AMD Radeon HD6950/6970(Cayman) Reviews

[zerazax]

first of all, there is no need to be so insulting towards my opinion.

It's not insulting at all, it's stating the same thing over and over again and ignoring other people's answers - and my comment was directed at general people who rehash the same tired old arguments again and again.

secondly let me just ask you this: were you so positive thinking about nvidias architecture when the first fermi came out? did you take every point of view and look at it with a bright light like you are doing with cayman? after all, fermi is a very foward looking architecture that will really shine at 28nm...

Sure. The big issues with Fermi were its extreme heat and noise output for the performance. The 5xx's show that when fixed, they're damn fine cards, though I'm sure expensive to produce

I might sound doom and gloom but you just seem to be making excuse after excuse for Amds failure to deliver a product that is more than 20% faster than its one year old last gen. it took one year of development to barely reach the 480 but everything is positive about cayman in your argument isnt it?

I'm keeping people's perspective in check. The card is 15% larger than its predecessor on the SAME process node - getting 20% faster is better perf/mm^2 for sure and roughly in line with perf/W when compared to the 1GB version, better perf/W than the 2GB 5870.

Your argument would be valid if they had jumped to 32nm and produced this, but they didn't, so it's in line with what Nvidia had to do on the same 40nm process - squeeze out what performance they can on the same node. My bet is that over the lifetime of the card, with more DX11 titles and other optimizations, the card is closer to the 30-35% range over the 5870 than just 20%, much like the 480 is closer to the 60% over the GTX 285 range than the 40-50 it started out at.

Im a big amd fan especially of their radeons, but I dont lie to myself mate, I give credit where credit is due and critque where critique is due. And this round Amd needs some of the latter. Thats the reality, except for those who refuse to accept it.

just because its priced competitive doesnt make it a perfect success.
you dont see amd dominating the processor world just because it sells six core for 200$.

You're not lying to yourself - but you're also disregarding the actual reality of the GPU market.

Intel dominates for many reasons other than just price - the fact that Intel has immense support and sales power against OEMs is why they dominate. Name a single OEM that has AMD processors? Intel's market share is much bigger than AMD because of large OEM contracts AND laptop contracts.

And in the CPU realm, Intel is actually POWER competitive - that is, at 95W, it will provide the same CPU experience if not better as AMD. In the GPU realm, that isn't true - GPU power usage can range a HUGE amount. People often pick up cards 50% more power hungry to get 30% more performance for example. In the CPU world, that's just not possible and would never be accepted. Also, in the CPU world, CPUs do similar tasks far more than GPUs, where features such as multi-monitor support, 3D, physics, GPGPU, etc. vary far more greatly than features CPUs have.

GPU market share, on the other hand, show AMD and Nvidia more or less neck and neck - compare this to when AMD was 30-35% market share vs. Nvidia at 70-65% in 2008, just before the RV770 release. In fact, the latest results have AMD with a slight edge over Nvidia if you put discrete + integrated desktop & notebook GPUs together for both of them.

Discrete desktop GPU market is largely outside the OEM realm - its users like us who buy it from stores like Newegg. Thus pricing DOES matter because they aren't giving large juicy OEM contracts here, and it's card vs. card.

OEMs take into consideration: cost, performance, heat, noise, power usage, etc. - a whole slew more considerations AS A WHOLE (i.e., they look at the whole package) than a typical individual user would, who is mostly concerned with 2 main things: price and performance. Noise, heat, power, etc. are secondary considerations.

No one is calling it a perfect success - similarly, the 4800 wasn't a perfect success from a performance perspective, but it still sold great because it was priced where people wanted high performing cards.

The entire situation reminds me of the 4800 & 5800 card positioning, only this time people's hype blew the card way out of proportion, whereas the other cards were pleasant surprises