[VC] AMD Radeon HD 9000 Series Launching in October?

[tajoh111]

You are skewing numbers and not taking into consideration many factors when comparing architectures/products.

I am being realistic here. The only time AMD has exceeded my expectations was the 4870(the 9700 pro days is too long ago) and that was a case of where AMD got to 2.5x everything about the 3870 because the 3870 was so small to begin with. The only time Nvidia has met my expectations were actually this generation and the gtx 8800. Both cases where we got a card faster than the dual chip predecessor and then some.

The gtx 760 and 7870 are very similar component for component. The 7870 has 12 percent more shaders, the gtx has 25 percent more bandwidth and they have the same clocks, but the gtx 760 is 20-25% faster. This is exactly why gk104 is able to catch up with tahiti which has way more shaders and computational power.

Component wise, a 2304 shader caracao xt(the 4024 shader rumor is ridiculous this generation) is going to have a hard time catching up to a 2304 shader gtx 780. GCN 2 better makes some pretty drastic improvements in efficiency all around, without cutting out the computing power.

AMD gave up something with the 7xxx series to make the chip more compute friendly. Unless they are going to cut some of that out, they are going to have a hard time beating gk110. gk110 552mm2 seems well utilized this generation and seems a bit more compute gaming orientated than the last generation. Combining both of these characteristics makes its so AMD has a hard time catching up to them with a 400nm or less chip, even 450nm might not do it. A fully spec'd gk110 has pretty scary performance potential.

If they were willing to push themselves to the point where some efficiency is lost like the 7970 ghz (which is partially made up with turbo) and used the same ddr5 in the gtx 770, they could probably make a card 50 percent faster than a ghz edition(15% faster than what they have now; a extra 100 mhz(some overclocked cards already have this like the evga acx), 14% more bandwidth and 192 more shaders). The gtx 580 or gtx 285 had no where near this potential.