And we have demonstrated proof in your lack of diplomacy. And perhaps I over-reacted: Accept my apology.
Not withstanding that, at no point did I say the gains would be limited to 1.1x. Point 2 refers to the gains associated with clock increases. Point 3 refers to 2x performance on texture bound resolutions, like 1920x1200 and higher. Point 5. refers to a application specific improvement associated with AA and FSAA.
Lets sit back with a beer and see how performance pans out. The challenge is 1.7x. If performance is >1.7x, I'll open a beer in your name and drink it with pleasure. And vice-versa. But the tool is 3dmark06. And it will be the same CPU. I'll only be looking at the combination of "SM2.0" + "SM3.0" scores, excl. the CPU score. And no it will NOT be a 1920x1200 test, but the regular demo test on 3dmark06. The 1920x1200 problem which was very clearly identified as being the #1 objective that ATI was trying to solve with the 32 TMU, is covered in my points 3. and 4.
If you misunderstood my original 7 points, that's OK. Perhaps it wasnt clear. But better to say, OK, now I understand what you mean, than to continue this "you dont know anything about xyz", or, "you've got a problem...". It is offensive language. And whether you use it on TPU, or with your friends, or at work, there will be people offended, whether they tell you or not. It's not a good way to start a dialog, let alone, cooperation. And that's what the TPU community is about.
Let's respect Thermo's request to keep flaming off the board. I'll say nothing more about it. Take it easy.
If there was really something offensive, then sorry. It must be something related to the language, something lost in translatioon, since I don't see any offensive language in what I said in my first reply. But I apologize if there was something offensive there. It would help me a lot if you tell me what exactly was offensive and an insult though. I did was offensive in the second, but only because you directly insulted me before.
But if you are talking about me saying you don't know about GPUs, if that is what you are taking as an insult, then I will take my apologies back. That's not an insult nor offensive and I am definately not going to say sorry for that, considering your reaction. It's just not offensive, I explained that in my previous post. There are lots of things that I don't know and I will never take as an insult if someone tells me so. You are demostrating you don't know about this, mate, and you are being arrogant by acting like a victim and taking offense for that. There's nothing to (miss)understand on your statements, they are just wrong. I'm trying to say this kindly, learn how a GPU works and then we'll discuss if those improvements will yield any gains. Some of the points could be true if they had only improved shaders and kept the rest as is, or if they only improved TMUs, but since they have improved both, plus the bandwidth enough to feed everything well your points are just wrong.
Just to point one of the things you learnt wrong. TMUs load and filter textures. They do their work on
pixels. It doesn't matter if the next pixel is from the same frame or the next, it's just the next pixel. For them doing 16x16 pixels at 20 frames is the same as doing 32x16 at 10 FPS. They are just doing their work on 5120 pixels/second. Double the number of TMUs (or double the clock) and you can do either double the frames at same resolution or double the resolution at same frames. It doesn't exist anything like "texture bound resolution". Exactly the same applies to shader processors. Double of their power gives exactly double the performance (for that stage of the graphics pipeline). If we have double the power in every stage, as is the case here, except on pixel-fillrate (ROPs), you will get double the performance.
Now if you know what ROPs do, you know that since Ati does AA with shaders, the only job that ROPs have to do is blend the different fragments together (sub-pixels, which are calculated in the SPs using the data fetched from textures), and that job is only related to the resolution and the number of fragments. RV670 and G92 have demostrated that the bottleneck was not in ROPs. Specially G92 has demostrated this, because it does AA in ROPs (it's a lot of work being done there), and even though fill-rate is smaller than on RV670, G92 is a lot faster. Ati offloads AA work from ROPs meaning that there's still more room. It's difficult to know if a bottleneck occurs on ROPs in an architecture that will relegate so many things to shaders, but it's common sense they wouldn't make all other parts double as fast, just to let this one be a big bottleneck. They have those things resolved before launch.
My first calculations are based on all that and have their logic based on the graphics pipeline. Your statements don't have any sense, they are not based on the reality of how a GPU works. I didn't want to be offensive when I said you didn't know about GPUs, I still don't. We don't have to know about everything in this life, but if we don't know something, we don't know, that's all, we don't have to act as if we knew and when they prove us wrong act as a victim. That is not the way to go. That's what I thought you were doing. If you are not doing that consciously, I apologize. And I'm going to apologize in advance just in case this post is also offensive to you. I'm not trying to offend you, believe me, I just think you don't know enough about what I explained above and that's all.
Let's forget about this until we can compare the cards.
But not in 3DM06, it's the worst aplication you can use to know the power of a card nowadays. Vantage maybe. And definately not in a 3 Ghz bottleneck...
- I really want to eat my 3870 
) let's do it on Crysis 1920x1200 4x AA or other new games that have not been released yet, and in an overclocked Quad at 3,6++ Ghz. They have already told you why you are not going to see the improvement on 3DM06 on a 3Ghz...