AMD Radeon HD6950/6970(Cayman) Reviews

[zerazax]

so its not all bad imo, I just think that the improvement in gaming performance over the 5870 was too small coming from so many changes and especially having seen the improvements with Barts. you claimed nvidia only improved 20% as well but we both already agreed fermi was much more constrained at 40nm than was cayman. At the same time I also dont consider the 580 next gen to the 480 but two wrongs dont make a right and Amd could have done more to capitalize on the closeness of the 580.

I agree they aimed too low, but that's hindsight - there's a ton of factors that go into what a GPU will end up doing. For instance, if Cypress wasn't making enough money for whatever reason - e.g. yields weren't up to par compared to a newly designed chip with new production redundancies built in, it might financially make sense to take out the product and put in a new one. That's what happened with the 580 - same size as the 480, but vastly improved for production.

And that's only part of the story - if 40nm is around for another year, who's to say that in 6 months AMD doesn't have a 6980 or 6975 or whatever. 32nm's cancellation fubared a lot of plans for people, and given that AMD was always a half generation ahead of Nvidia in process acceptance, it hurt AMD a lot more this refresh-generation than Nvidia. Remember when within a generation of GPUs, you could count on a refresh to happen eventually on a new process? A'la G70->G71, G80->G92, etc. Not anymore it appears.

Here are some more accurate numbers: http://www.guru3d.com/news/amd-gpu-m...clining-again/

Crazy how nVidia gained marketshare in Q3 of this year (july-sep) even though ATi had the dominant card in pretty much every price range.

You do realize that Intel also gained in the market share right? In fact, INTEL gained A LOT more than Nvidia did.

The biggest reason: AMD lost major OEM contracts in the notebook sector to Nvidia's 4xxM cards and Intel's i3/i5 w/ integrated GPU.

And since Intel doesn't do discrete GPUs, it's pretty clear where most of AMD's loss came from - NOT discrete GPUs

So please, spare me the following part of your post with your little self-righteous ego-stroking trolling blurb when you can't even interpret the data objectively

Come on. You and everyone else who frequents these threads knows that if the tables were turned and this was nVidia's chance to STOMP on the competition with a massively powerful card over a year in the making after being recently trounced by a card all the critics said wouldn't be released till 2011 (GF110), you and the rest of the ATi peanut gallery would have flooded this thread with photoshoped images of houses burning down, and other crap.

I've commented on this phenomena many times over the years, on how incredibly different the ATi and nVidia crowds act when they either have a great success or an epic failure. Come to think of it, I have yet to see that type of behavior at all from the nVidia guys even though it is clear as day that ATi just spent almost a year and a half building a next gen graphics card that is actually slower than their previous generation. I believe that is historical in that of itself.

I was actually hoping for ATi to release a killer card in order to help bring the GTX580 within the purchasing range of my wallet. And as seen by the highly subdued response of the ATi fans here on this forum (and the crickets chirping)... this card was a dud.

oh... and please quit with the "power consumption" justification for this being a winner. Everyone knows global warming (now climate change. actually they recently changed it a third time) is a huge farce, and is looking to be largest financial scandal of modern history.

When I'm playing a game I want the most FPS , electric bill be damned. The last thing I'm' going to do when my framerate slows to a slide show is say to myself "wow!! look at all the electricity I'm saving!!!!".


It seems that currently most of the very vocal ATi crowd are still in the first stage of a 5 stage process typically associated with poor graphics card performance.

Ok so somehow I'm part of this peanut gallery?

I'm the one who's giving those facts of the actual market, and how the GPU business goes, but go ahead and don't let facts get in the way

P.S. Want a reason why you don't see those Nvidia fans around anymore? Cause most of them all got banned in the last two years there's quite a few names there too people will remember, and the bans ought to tell you what it was like