Kepler Nvidia GeForce GTX 780

[cal_guy]

Quoting this for emphasis since I want to bring up some points here:

Tahiti is the first AMD core that puts a ton of focus on compute and DX11 rendering rather than being a unified architecture with some DX11 bits tacked on.

Fermi was built from the ground up for compute and DX11.

AMD is currently grappling with the heat, power consumption and die space (albeit at on a more efficient process technology) restrictions that NVIDIA went through with Fermi.

As mentioned by NVIDIA in several public presentations, Kepler is meant to be a second generation "ground up" architecture which essentially means they have learned from past experiences and have focused upon perf per watt. At least that's what this slide from 2010 says.

AMD is in many ways still on their 1st generation dedicated compute / DX11 architecture due to Tahiti / GCN skipping 32nm and instead waiting for 28nm to come around.

Take that as you will. Those are just the facts.

It's all a series of trade offs after all it took nVidia exactly 2 years to get to their 2nd Generation compute architecture, while for AMD it's looking to be 10-15 months to reach it's 2nd Generation. Hey maybe both AMD and nVidia will reach their 3rd generation at the same time.

It appears to be the only time they can win. Going to be a rough year for AMD on all fronts.

I suspect a HD 7970 Ghz+ edition (aka "7800 GTX 512" edition) should narrow (or increase) the difference between the difference between GTX 680 and HD 7970.