I want......

[DarkStarr]

Wow.... this is insane if these are true specs a 6870 will be more powerful than a 5970 AND use less power and a 6970 will be insanely over the top powerful Looks like AMD is gonna murder Nvidia as of now. How can Nvidia catch up? They are gonna be late to push cards out yet again since you cant just push a series out (400 Series) then just a couple months later push out an entire new line. For comparison:

GTX480 1536 Mb Vram 33.6 GP/s 42 GT/s 177.4 GB/s 384 bit bus 1344.96 GFLOPs 250 Watts
5870 1024 Mb Vram 27.2 GP/s 68 GT/s 153.6 GB/s 256 bit bus 2720.00 GFLOPs 188 Watts
5970 2x1024 Mb Vram 46.4 GP/s 116 GT/s 2x128 GB/s 2x256 bit bus 4640 GFLOPs 294 Watts
6870 2048 Mb Vram 54.4 GP/s 81.6 GT/s 332.8 Gb/s 512 bit bus 4080 GFLOPs 225 Watts
6970 4096 Mb Vram 99.2 GP/s 148.7 GT/s 563.2 Gb/s 2x512 bit bus 7440 GFLOPs 330 Watts
Eyefinity 6970 4096 Mb Vram 102.4 GP/s 153.6 GT/s 614.4 Gb/s 2x512 bit bus 7440 GFLOPs 335 Watts

These 6k series cards look to be immensly powerful even though they are only hybrid chips not the entire new architecture, Nvidia will have to step its game up or we will have only AMD/Intel GPUs

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Based on those specs there, the 6870 is not more powerful than the 5970, look at the FLOP and texel counts...

5970 2x1024 Mb Vram 46.4 GP/s 116 GT/s 2x128 GB/s 2x256 bit bus 4640 GFLOPs 294 Watts
6870 2048 Mb Vram 54.4 GP/s 81.6 GT/s 332.8 Gb/s 512 bit bus 4080 GFLOPs 225 Watts

Their metric for performance is supposedly based solely on pixel processing, which seems odd.

Also, according to that counter, the 480 GTX is underpowered compared to the 5870, when in fact, it's faster. The 480 can push more pixels but has half the floating point calculations....? these statistics seem completely bogus to me.... where you get them from?

 

[DarkStarr]

I got them from the wikis but I mean pixelwise the 6870 is more powerful than a 5970 as well as bandwidth wise and I bet it will cost less than the 5970 did, and with an OC on it if they OC like the 5k series it may get fairly close to a 5970 Texelwise.

 

[DarkStarr]

According to an article at http://techreport.com/articles.x/18682, " In theory, the GTX 480 is, amazingly, slower at texturing than the GTX 285, but Nvidia expects the GF100 to deliver higher real-world texturing performance thanks to some texture cache optimizations that should reduce conflicts during sampling."

So the 6870 could be lower in number but still have better performance if AMD optimizes the texture cache a bit (which is claimed to have happened) It also says

"More troubling are the comparisons to the Radeon HD 5870. Yes, the GTX 480 is badly beaten in the FLOPS numbers by the 5870. That was also true of the comparison between the GTX 280 and Radeon HD 4870 in the prior generation, yet it was never a real problem, because Nvidia's scheduling methods are more efficient than AMD's. The sheer magnitude of the gap in FLOPS here is unsettling, but the areas of potentially greater concern include memory bandwidth, ROP rate, and texturing. Theoretically, the GTX 480 is only slightly quicker in the former two categories, since relatively low GDDR5 clock rates look to have hampered its memory bandwidth. And it's substantially slower than the 5870 at texturing. As we've said before, the GF100 will have to make up in efficiency what it lacks in brute-force capacity, assuming the competition leaves room for that."

Basically it's saying GFLOPs are not everything so if the scheduling is more efficient than in the 5k series it could easily be a bit better than a 5970. (They also have a chart listing specs of the 480 5870 and 285 )

EDIT: I really wonder how cool a 5870 with a 480 cooler on it would run....... someone out there should do it!!

 

[Tharic-Nar]

I guess it also means that if the 5 series was optimised more, it would have trounced Nvidia's 4 series.... there's a scary thought..... I've seen it with other comparisons, quite often the case, fill rate on a GPU has a much greater affect on frame rate, and the 480 has a 30% gain over the 5870, i guess the front end is more important than the back end. Going by that alone, with a fill rate doubled on the 6 series, it could very well double the performance. We shall see in a couple months - no wait, the 6870 won't be due probably till 2011, since it's the mainstream coming out first, due to manufacturing problems....

 

[DarkStarr]

Well there shouldn't really be any manufacturing issues since its the same process size as the 5k series. Although the die size is quite a bit larger, it's still far from the 480s own 529mm die with 435mm being the supposed size for the 6870. It went up from 334mm on the 5870, so up 100mm but still roughly 100mm away from Fermi territory. The 67xx is supposedly set for next month and the 68xx set for November and the 6970 for December just in time for Christmas. Haha could you imagine asking for a $899 GPU for Christmas. I will never get any single part that expensive unless I end up making obscene amounts of money.