GeForce GTX 580 Expected to be 20% Faster than GeForce GTX 480

[wahdangun]

Woot, TPU's heavy bias comes out the wood work again! *fist pumps*

Hopefully they can up the performance when it actually comes out, it's still WAY to early to tell anything.

sorry I'm just make fun about that dumb nvdia CEO launching fermi with "wooden" version and claiming it was the "real" fermi card,

and i think it will be Q1 2011 before this chip ready because let face it nvdia even can't release the full fermi, they need to shrink it to 28nm to be feasible unless they reduce the shader and make it more efficient just like HD 6870.

btw I'm not fanboy but nvdia have crush my dream for price war with their late and stupid move, but thank God there are HD 6870 that bring the price war come back just like HD 48XX vs GTX 2XX era

 

[CDdude55]

sorry I'm just make fun about that dumb nvdia CEO launching fermi with "wooden" version and claiming it was the "real" fermi card,

and i think it will be Q1 2011 before this chip ready because let face it nvdia even can't release the full fermi, they need to shrink it to 28nm to be feasible unless they reduce the shader and make it more efficient just like HD 6870.

btw I'm not fanboy but nvdia have crush my dream for price war with their late and stupid move, but thank God there are HD 6870 that bring the price war come back just like HD 48XX vs GTX 2XX era

I agree. I doubt we will see any new card release from Nvidia anytime soon, but then again, they could release a Fermi refresh by the end of the year to battle it out with the 6900's, they could also go 28nm, but isn't that more reserved for Kepler?

They'll probably just cut prices for the 480 this holiday and wait till next year to really come back with something.

 

[wahdangun]

I agree. I doubt we will see any new card release from Nvidia anytime soon, but then again, they could release a Fermi refresh by the end of the year to battle it out with the 6900's, they could also go 28nm, but isn't that more reserved for Kepler?

They'll probably just cut prices for the 480 this holiday and wait till next year to really come back with something.

no i don't think so, because next year when the TSMC ready with their 28nm ati will surely release their full fledged NI card. and i think what Nvdia can do right now is just cut the price down (and make loss) or discontinue altogether and probably keep GTX 460 around just like they did with GTX 2XX when its clearly fermi won't arrive for next 4 month !!!

or maybe nvdia have another sinister plan like tomshardware said :

It also remains to be seen if Nvidia can maintain the long-term price war it recently declared. Every single GeForce GTX 470 is equipped with a monolithic GF100 GPU in the 530 square millimeter range. That’s close to twice the size of the Radeon HD 6870’s 255 mm2 die. How long can Nvidia keep up such a numbers-based fight? Not long, we’d guess, if there’s nothing else waiting in the wings. But this sure would be a good time to introduce a card with a fully-equipped GF104 and 384 CUDA cores enabled (Ed.: I can’t comment, but I know something that you don’t, Don).

 

[Benetanegia]

no i don't think so, because next year when the TSMC ready with their 28nm ati will surely release their full fledged NI card. and i think what Nvdia can do right now is just cut the price down (and make loss) or discontinue altogether and probably keep GTX 460 around just like they did with GTX 2XX when its clearly fermi won't arrive for next 4 month !!!

or maybe nvdia have another sinister plan like tomshardware said :

I think that the fully enabled and/or higher clocked GF104 will be released soon.

Also I still strongly believe that Nvidia will release GF110 this year, because that must have been the plan since a long time ago, since they got the firts GF104 die on their hands. There's no news of any GF100 chip fabbed after the initial batches in Q1/early Q2. For example this is the GF100 on Wizzard's review of the MSI GTX480 Lightning card reviewed a few days ago:

As can be seen in the code 1015A3, the chip is A3 silicon fabbed in week 15 of 2010. Week 15 = April.

GF100 die as seen on Wizzard's review of the GTX480 on release day:

Week 9.

GTX460 as seen on Wizzard's review at launch day:

Week 22

Only 7-13 weeks difference. 2-3 months on production chips, GF104 test samples should have been on Nvidia's hands some weeks earlier. It should have been pretty obvious for Nvidia pretty soon that GF104 was so much better and the fact that it seems there's no newly fabbed GF100 since then (week 15) suggests that Nvidia didn't expect GF100 to last too much on the market once they saw GF104. The fact that the GTX460 was so seriously crippled in order to be able to clear GF100 inventories fast, also suggests they had something coming for which they wanted to make room for IMO. If they have no more GF100 (as can be deduced by the fact that even cards released now are remains from so long ago) they should have something to fill that segment up. I don't think they wanted to be months without anything that can even remotedly compete with Cayman, and GF100 could at least compete/be close performance wise.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[trt740]

Haha, the new GrillForce is coming! Chefs going to like it.
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/2701/grillforce.jpg

I'm not so sure, won't this be built on a smaller die like the gtx 460 and if so it should be allot cooler and handle more functions per shader.

 

[wahdangun]

I think that the fully enabled and/or higher clocked GF104 will be released soon.

Also I still strongly believe that Nvidia will release GF110 this year, because that must have been the plan since a long time ago, since they got the firts GF104 die on their hands. There's no news of any GF100 chip fabbed after the initial batches in Q1/early Q2. For example this is the GF100 on Wizzard's review of the MSI GTX480 Lightning card reviewed a few days ago:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/N480GTX_GTX_480_Lightning/images/gpu.jpg

As can be seen in the code 1015A3, the chip is A3 silicon fabbed in week 15 of 2010. Week 15 = April.

GF100 die as seen on Wizzard's review of the GTX480 on release day:

http://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_480_Fermi/images/gpu_small.jpg

Week 9.

GTX460 as seen on Wizzard's review at launch day:

http://tpucdn.com/reviews/MSI/GeForce_GTX_460_Cyclone_OC_768_MB/images/gpu_small.jpg

Week 22

Only 7-13 weeks difference. 2-3 months on production chips, GF104 test samples should have been on Nvidia's hands some weeks earlier. It should have been pretty obvious for Nvidia pretty soon that GF104 was so much better and the fact that it seems there's no newly fabbed GF100 since then (week 15) suggests that Nvidia didn't expect GF100 to last too much on the market once they saw GF104. The fact that the GTX460 was so seriously crippled in order to be able to clear GF100 inventories fast, also suggests they had something coming for which they wanted to make room for IMO. If they have no more GF100 (as can be deduced by the fact that even cards released now are remains from so long ago) they should have something to fill that segment up. I don't think they wanted to be months without anything that can even remotedly compete with Cayman, and GF100 could at least compete/be close performance wise.

Just my 2 cents.

i dunno because nvdia already do that when GTX2XX can't compete in price and performance they simply EOL it, even tough the fermi card not ready for months,

but it think nvdia will use AMD trick, and after seeing how well the GTX460 oc i can certainly sure they will be releasing full fledged GTX 460 with significantly higher clock to minimize HD 6970 damage

 

[motasim]

... but it think nvdia will use AMD trick, and after seeing how well the GTX460 oc i can certainly sure they will be releasing full fledged GTX 460 with significantly higher clock to minimize HD 6970 damage

I think you mean 6870 and not 6970, since the performance of a fully enabled GTX 460 will only come close to that of a 6870, keeping in mind that the 6970 is intended to blow the GTX480 away.

 

[Benetanegia]

I think you mean 6870 and not 6970, since the performance of a fully enabled GTX 460 will only come close to that of a 6870, keeping in mind that the 6970 is intended to blow the GTX480 away.

Well I think he does not mean HD6870 at all. You are completely wrong. Fully enabled and properly clocked, a GF104 most probably smokes the HD6870. A GTX460 @ 800 Mhz is already as fast as HD6870 and has about the same OC potential left on it according to Wizzard reviews. With 15% more of it enabled you can be sure that it would be almost 15% faster and close to a GTX480. Properly priced it could make Cayman look like overkill and overpriced. Bear in mind that Nvidia is already selling GF104 at (and below) $200 in the form of GTX460, meaning that a fully enabled one for $250 is posible. I mean production cost of a GTX460 and the supposed GTX475 would be similar, maybe it could cost $10-$25 more to make, so selling them for $250 ($50-$75) would be a relief. And they are already selling GTX470 for that much anyway.

 

[senninex]

AND.. to be HOTTER CARD EVER WITH MORE THAN 20% OF WATTAGE NEEDED!

 

[CDdude55]

snip

Unnecessarily big font as well as a grammar fail all in one post... :shadedshu

 

[Roph]

 

[Steevo]

So a paper launch, on a cocktail napkin telling us the place in the future of when the paper launch will be, at a special Nvidia event, to keep all the girls giggling about the new size of a plastic penis extender.


Wow, the drama.

 

[CDdude55]

http://i.imgur.com/Ywqjl.jpg

They're still awesome cards(performance wise)...

 

[wahdangun]

I think you mean 6870 and not 6970, since the performance of a fully enabled GTX 460 will only come close to that of a 6870, keeping in mind that the 6970 is intended to blow the GTX480 away.

Well I think he does not mean HD6870 at all. You are completely wrong. Fully enabled and properly clocked, a GF104 most probably smokes the HD6870. A GTX460 @ 800 Mhz is already as fast as HD6870 and has about the same OC potential left on it according to Wizzard reviews. With 15% more of it enabled you can be sure that it would be almost 15% faster and close to a GTX480. Properly priced it could make Cayman look like overkill and overpriced. Bear in mind that Nvidia is already selling GF104 at (and below) $200 in the form of GTX460, meaning that a fully enabled one for $250 is posible. I mean production cost of a GTX460 and the supposed GTX475 would be similar, maybe it could cost $10-$25 more to make, so selling them for $250 ($50-$75) would be a relief. And they are already selling GTX470 for that much anyway.

yes, i mean HD 6970, and bene there is no overkill for use TPUers, we even just maxed crysis, so maybe we need that kind of power for crysis 2.

and btw i think nvdia make almost no profit for GTX 470, just think about it even the GTX 480 still sell for $400 and they have almost same PCB design and same GPU,

 

[Tatty_Two]

AND.. to be HOTTER CARD EVER WITH MORE THAN 20% OF WATTAGE NEEDED! Although i have no clue what I am talking about as we only have speculation to play with at the moment

My troll senses twitched as I visited TPU this morning

 

[motasim]

Well I think he does not mean HD6870 at all. You are completely wrong. Fully enabled and properly clocked, a GF104 most probably smokes the HD6870. A GTX460 @ 800 Mhz is already as fast as HD6870 and has about the same OC potential left on it according to Wizzard reviews. With 15% more of it enabled you can be sure that it would be almost 15% faster and close to a GTX480. Properly priced it could make Cayman look like overkill and overpriced. Bear in mind that Nvidia is already selling GF104 at (and below) $200 in the form of GTX460, meaning that a fully enabled one for $250 is posible. I mean production cost of a GTX460 and the supposed GTX475 would be similar, maybe it could cost $10-$25 more to make, so selling them for $250 ($50-$75) would be a relief. And they are already selling GTX470 for that much anyway.

Cool down mate I just thought that wahdangun made a typo, and now that I know that it wasn't a typo; it still doesn't make sense to me. It takes two GTX 460 in SLI (noting that they scale excellently) to beat the GTX 480. Now we already know that the upcoming 6970 will blow the GTX 480 away; so logic says that it'll take a dual-GF104-chip GPU to perform close to the 6970.

Now, I know what you'll say, that the GF104 in GTX 460 is not "fully-enabled", so let's examine that statment shall we; does anybody really expect a "fully-enabled" GF104 to equally perform as two of the standard GF104 used in GTX460?! That would be stupid, right? The fact is that you've made a lot of illogical speculations about the upcoming "GTX 475" without substantiating them with any benchmarks or evidence, thus sounding like a true nVidia fanboy Benetanegia. Let's be mature here and not argue over pure speculations, or it's just a waste of time.

I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you; but the logical conclusion is that even the "fully-enabled", "properly-clocked", and "properly-priced" GF104 you are hoping for can never touch Cayman.

That said; I truly hope that nVidia will come up with a pleasant surprise soon in their GTX 580 or whatever it is called, otherwise it is definitely Cayman for me. I am going to build a new gaming rig in December/January and I'll buy the best GPU that I can get for $425 at that time, regardless if it was nVidia or AMD/ATI.

Edit: ... just one more thought came to mind: Benetanegia called Cayman an overkill, but I wonder if he said the same about the GTX 480 when it was launched for $500+ as any objective person would do ... I think not, the bias towards nVidia is clear in every word he writes ...

 

[CDdude55]

Cool down mate I just thought that wahdangun made a typo, and now that I know that it wasn't a typo; it still doesn't make sense to me. It takes two GTX 460 in SLI (noting that they scale excellently) to beat the GTX 480. Now we already know that the upcoming 6970 will blow the GTX 480 away; so logic says that it'll take a dual-GF104-chip GPU to perform close to the 6970.

Now, I know what you'll say, that the GF104 in GTX 460 is not "fully-enabled", so let's examine that statment shall we; does anybody really expect a "fully-enabled" GF104 to equally perform as two of the standard GF104 used in GTX460?! That would be stupid, right? The fact is that you've made a lot of illogical speculations about the upcoming "GTX 475" without substantiating them with any benchmarks or evidence, thus sounding like a true nVidia fanboy Benetanegia. Let's be mature here and not argue over pure speculations, or it's just a waste of time.

I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you; but the logical conclusion is that even the "fully-enabled", "properly-clocked", and "properly-priced" GF104 you are hoping for can never touch Cayman.

That said; I truly hope that nVidia will come up with a pleasant surprise soon in the GTX 580 or whatever it is called, otherwise it definitely Cayman for me. I am going to build a new gaming rig in December/January and I'll buy the best GPU that I can get for $425 at that time, regardless if it was nVidia or AMD/ATI.

Edit: ... just one more thought came to mind: Benetanegia called Cayman an overkill, but I wonder if he said the same about the GTX 480 when it was launched for $500+ as any objective person would do ... I think not, the bias towards nVidia is clear in every word he writes ...

I don't think we truly know enough about Caymen to determine that, you talk as though it will inevitable be better, but that's still just strong speculation.

 

[motasim]

I don't think we truly know enough about Caymen to determine that, you talk as though it will inevitable be better, but that's still just strong speculation.

I only have this , but again CDdude55, logically if it wouldn't be better (and they have had a year to work on it now), then why the hell are they bothering with it, and who would buy it if it wasn't?!

 

[Benetanegia]

Cool down mate I just thought that wahdangun made a typo, and now that I know that it wasn't a typo; it still doesn't make sense to me. It takes two GTX 460 in SLI (noting that they scale excellently) to beat the GTX 480. Now we already know that the upcoming 6970 will blow the GTX 480 away; so logic says that it'll take a dual-GF104-chip GPU to perform close to the 6970.

Now, I know what you'll say, that the GF104 in GTX 460 is not "fully-enabled", so let's examine that statment shall we; does anybody really expect a "fully-enabled" GF104 to equally perform as two of the standard GF104 used in GTX460?! That would be stupid, right? The fact is that you've made a lot of illogical speculations about the upcoming "GTX 475" without substantiating them with any benchmarks or evidence, thus sounding like a true nVidia fanboy Benetanegia. Let's be mature here and not argue over pure speculations, or it's just a waste of time.

I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you; but the logical conclusion is that even the "fully-enabled", "properly-clocked", and "properly-priced" GF104 you are hoping for can never touch Cayman.

That said; I truly hope that nVidia will come up with a pleasant surprise soon in their GTX 580 or whatever it is called, otherwise it is definitely Cayman for me. I am going to build a new gaming rig in December/January and I'll buy the best GPU that I can get for $425 at that time, regardless if it was nVidia or AMD/ATI.

Edit: ... just one more thought came to mind: Benetanegia called Cayman an overkill, but I wonder if he said the same about the GTX 480 when it was launched for $500+ as any objective person would do ... I think not, the bias towards nVidia is clear in every word he writes ...

Funny that you tell me that I'm making conclusions with no info, when it's you the only one doing that:

Now we already know that the upcoming 6970 will blow the GTX 480 away

We know what? And even those numbers mean nothing in reality. Vantage? A HD5870 is as fast as a GTX480 in Vantage. So that Vantage benchmark could only mean that Cayman is some 30% faster than Cypress and hence only 15% faster than GTX480. And even then we'd still be basing our assumptions on thin air, since those benchmarks are probably fake.

My (let's call it) "assumption" (although you'll see how it's not) of fully enabled GF104 performance is based on hard facts on the other hand. A GTX460 @ 820 Mhz is as fast as a GTX470 and hence also HD6870:

And with 15% more shaders/TMU/tesselators/... enabled it would be almost 15% faster because Fermi scales that way (well) based on shading performance. You don't believe me?

Let's see what the GFlops are for the Fermi lineup:

GT430 = 268.8 GFlops
GTS450 = 601.34 GFlops
GTX460 = 907.2 GFlops
GTX470 = 1088.64 GFlops
GTX480 = 1344.96 GFlops

Now let's normalize those numbers so that a GTX460 represents 85% just like in the chart above and see if there's a relation. What I'm doing is if 907 Gflops = 85% then 268.8 = 85% *268.8/907.2 = 25.18%. OK let's do it for all the cards listed above:

GT430 = 25.18% ---------> 27% on the chart
GTS450 = 56,34 %--------> 55% on the chart
GTX460 = 85% -----------> 85% on the chart obviously
GTX470 = 102% ----------> 104% on the chart
GTX480 = 126% ----------> 128% on the chart

The conclusion is no other than Fermi scales linearly with GFlops. And what would be the GFlops for the hypothetic GTX475?

384 SPs * 800/850 Mhz *2 (shader clock) *2 (FMADD) = 1228.8/1305.6 Gflops

And normalized:

GTX475 = 115/122% +/- 2%

So now that we both DO know what would be the performance of the supposed GTX475, let's explain what I meant.

If Nvidia releases that card that is within a hair of GTX480 performance for $250 anything that would sell above that price would look simply overkill/overpriced for almost anyone except enthusiasts and Cayman XT will most probably sell for more than $400. Also bear in mind that such card would cost Nvidia almost the same to make as GTX460 1GB does so selling them at $250 would be a relief rather than a curse.

Oh and BTW for most people's needs anything above a GTX460 or HD5850 is overkill. For most people, it was overkill selling at $500 and even now is still overkill (for most people) selling for $400.

 

[motasim]

Funny that you tell me that I'm making conclusions with no info, when it's you the only one doing that:



We know what? And even those numbers mean nothing in reality. Vantage? A HD5870 is as fast as a GTX480 in Vantage. So that Vantage benchmark could only mean that Cayman is some 30% faster than Cypress and hence only 15% faster than GTX480. And even then we'd still be basing our assumptions on thin air, since those benchmarks are probably fake.

My (let's call it) "assumption" (although you'll see how it's not) of fully enabled GF104 performance is based on hard facts on the other hand. A GTX460 @ 820 Mhz is as fast as a GTX470 and hence also HD6870:

http://tpucdn.com/reviews/Colorful/iGame_GTX_460_1_GB/images/perfrel_1920.gif

And with 15% more shaders/TMU/tesselators/... enabled it would be almost 15% faster because Fermi scales that way (well) based on shading performance. You don't believe me?

Let's see what the GFlops are for the Fermi lineup:

GT430 = 268.8 GFlops
GTS450 = 601.34 GFlops
GTX460 = 907.2 GFlops
GTX470 = 1088.64 GFlops
GTX480 = 1344.96 GFlops

Now let's normalize those numbers so that a GTX460 represents 85% just like in the chart above and see if there's a relation. What I'm doing is if 907 Gflops = 85% then 268.8 = 85% *268.8/907.2 = 25.18%. OK let's do it for all the cards listed above:

GT430 = 25.18% ---------> 27% on the chart
GTS450 = 56,34 %--------> 55% on the chart
GTX460 = 85% -----------> 85% on the chart obviously
GTX470 = 102% ----------> 104% on the chart
GTX480 = 126% ----------> 128% on the chart

The conclusion is no other than Fermi scales linearly with GFlops. And what would be the GFlops for the hypothetic GTX475?

384 SPs * 800/850 Mhz *2 (shader clock) *2 (FMADD) = 1228.8/1305.6 Gflops

And normalized:

GTX475 = 115/122% +/- 2%

So now that we both DO know what would be the performance of the supposed GTX475, let's explain what I meant.

If Nvidia releases that card that is within a hair of GTX480 performance for $250 anything that would sell above that price would look simply overkill/overpriced for almost anyone except enthusiasts and Cayman XT will most probably sell for more than $400. Also bear in mind that such card would cost Nvidia almost the same to make as GTX460 1GB does so selling them at $250 would be a relief rather than a curse.

Oh and BTW for most people's needs anything above a GTX460 or HD5850 is overkill. For most people, it was overkill selling at $500 and even now is still overkill (for most people) selling for $400.

Nice statistical work Benetanegia, and I have to admit that there is some logic in your point of view now that you've explained it. My take on this matter is as follows:

1) I don't think that it is right to decide for other people what they need or don't need. How can you say that anything above the HD 5850/GTX 460 is an overkill; that means that the huge crowd who bought the highly successful 5870 are idiots, which is definitely not the case. It's a free world so just let everyone select the GPU that suits him/her best, and spare us your personal judgments.

2) If nVidia is going to release this GTX 475 or whatever it is called any time soon, and knowing that this GPU will perform as good as the GTX 480 yet selling at $250, then they would definitely inform the GPU manufacturers ahead to take certain measures to deplete their stock of GTX 480 & GTX 470 GPUs (through discounts, bundles, ... etc) since after such a GPU hits the market at that price point; they'll never be able to move the GF100 GPUs, right??? If this was the case then how come MSI has just released the N480GTX Lightning GPU and Point of View have just announced the TGT GTX 480 Beast GPU? It simply doesn't make sense. Yes, I do believe that nVidia is going to release a fully enabled GF104 chip GPU soon according to many rumors, but the performance will only compete with the 6870 and not the GTX480, thus targeting the gamers' sweet spot as they call it, but this won't be enough for enthusiasts. In fact now that I see that ZOTAC are going to soon release the GTX 460 X2, I become more and more convinced that nVidia are not going to release the long-awaited GTX 495 (dual GF104 chip GPU), otherwise ZOTAC wouldn't have taken this initiative on their own.

3) Forget about possibly fake benchmarks of the 6970 or whatever, just listen to simple reasoning. AMD already have the 5870 which is a very successful GPU performing just behind the GTX 480, and noting that it has been over a year since they released the 5870 so they have had enough time to develop the 6970, then just tell me by what logic would AMD produce this new GPU if it wouldn't beat the GTX 480? Simply not possible. Enthusiasts and Extreme Gamers (who are targeted by the Cayman XT & Pro GPUs) are always looking for what is faster and better, and that's where the 6970 fit in. Even if it was only 10-15% better than the GTX 480, but achieving that at a reasonable TDP and power efficiency, then it'll definitely be a winner, given they don't price it stupidly.

 

[Benetanegia]

Nice statistical work Benetanegia, and I have to admit that there is some logic in your point of view now that you've explained it. My take on this matter is as follows:

1) I don't think that it is right to decide for other people what they need or don't need. How can you say that anything above the HD 5850/GTX 460 is an overkill; that means that the huge crowd who bought the highly successful 5870 are idiots, which is definitely not the case. It's a free world so just let everyone select the GPU that suits him/her best, and spare us your personal judgments.

2) If nVidia is going to release this GTX 475 or whatever it is called any time soon, and knowing that this GPU will perform as good as the GTX 480 yet selling at $250, then they would definitely inform the GPU manufacturers ahead to take certain measures to deplete their stock of GTX 480 & GTX 470 GPUs (through discounts, bundles, ... etc) since after such a GPU hits the market at that price point; they'll never be able to move the GF100 GPUs, right??? If this was the case then how come MSI has just released the N480GTX Lightning GPU and Point of View have just announced the TGT GTX 480 Beast GPU? It simply doesn't make sense. Yes, I do believe that nVidia is going to release a fully enabled GF104 chip GPU soon according to many rumors, but the performance will only compete with the 6870 and not the GTX480, thus targeting the gamers' sweet spot as they call it, but this won't be enough for enthusiasts. In fact now that I see that ZOTAC are going to soon release the GTX 460 X2, I become more and more convinced that nVidia are not going to release the long-awaited GTX 495 (dual GF104 chip GPU), otherwise ZOTAC wouldn't have taken this initiative on their own.

3) Forget about possibly fake benchmarks of the 6970 or whatever, just listen to simple reasoning. AMD already have the 5870 which is a very successful GPU performing just behind the GTX 480, and noting that it has been over a year since they released the 5870 so they have had enough time to develop the 6970, then just tell me by what logic would AMD produce this new GPU if it wouldn't beat the GTX 480? Simply not possible. Enthusiasts and Extreme Gamers (who are targeted by the Cayman XT & Pro GPUs) are always looking for what is faster and better, and that's where the 6970 fit in. Even if it was only 10-15% better than the GTX 480, but achieving that at a reasonable TDP and power efficiency, then it'll definitely be a winner, given they don't price it stupidly.

1) I'm not deciding anything. I'm just stating what most people's perception is. How come GTX460 is so successful? How come AMD released Barts especifically for that price point? Because it's what most people are willing to buy. For 90% of people Barts has made Cypress pointless. And GTX480 is also pointless, but in reality both cards were enthusiast cards and not meant to sell a lot. Either way a strong $250 card just narrows the enthusiast market even further and that's what I am talking about and I think that's in a sense what wahdangun was saying.

... but it think nvdia will use AMD trick, and after seeing how well the GTX460 oc i can certainly sure they will be releasing full fledged GTX 460 with significantly higher clock to minimize HD 6970 damage

Nowhere there he is saying that fully enabled GF104 will be close to Cayman performance wise, and neither I said that anywhere. We are just saying that a strong performance part will most likely steal a lot of high-end sales and GTX475 could certainly do that.

2) GTX480 performance from this GTX475 is not a certainty and neither is a necessity. It just needs to offer enough performance to play nearly all games maxed out. A GTX460/HD68xx/HD5850 already does that according to what maxed out means for the grand mayority. Anything faster is going to be welcome as long as it's priced really well, but very few are going to rush to the store to buy $400+ cards, no matter what performance it offers, because it's simply not needed, and much less if there's something for $250 that suits their needs just as well.

As to why partners are releasing those cards, because that's the way they are going to get rid of GF100. I could ask you why they released the GTX465 just a month prior to GF104 if they knew it was going to kick GTX465 in the butt. Because they had to sell them.

As for Nvidia, they've done everything on their hand to sell those GF100, including releasing the GTX460 as it is instead of releasing the full chip, in order to not steal GF100 sales. The explanation of bad yields is false. Yields work in two directions: 1) defects that render some parts unusable 2) defects that limit maximum attainable clocks on certain areas. Both always go hand in hand, they never get a lot of one type but none of the other. The situation we are seing is literally imposible: not enough chips to be able to release a 384 SP SKU from day one and every single GTX460 being able to hit 850 mhz at the same time is just not posible. If yields were bad clocks wouldn't be good either and even if that would be posible, it still does not explain why the GTX460 was not released at 750-850 Mhz to begin with. The only xplanation is that GF100 had to sell. And why did GF100 have to sell? Because something better is coming to fill that gap.

3- Yes, 15-20% faster than GTX480 is posible, and maybe some more, but those who think that Cayman is going to be twice as fast as Barts are just living in a pipe dream. I mean, I'll never say it's imposible, but it's very very very unlikely. For instance Barts is not a real improvement over Cypress/Juniper. It offers close performance while being smaller mostly because it lacks dual precision (FP64) support, just Like Juniper did. The other reason is that is very well known that Cypress had some scaling issues with more than 1440 SP. A HD5850 running at same clocks is just as fast as HD5870 and there's no way to know if the same would happen with HD5830 if it weren't for the crippled ROP count. 16 ROPs was a necessity or a trick to not expose the scaling problem? We'll never know. Barts hits a good spot and that's all. There's no way to know at this point if Cayman will scale any better than Cypress, and it needs to scale much much better if they want to make a real difference.

Another issue with 2x Barts Cayman is size. Barts while smaller than Cypress is 255 mm^2, but it lacks FP64 support. Twice that and you are at 500 mm^2, bring in some optimizations and you go lower than that, but then you have to bring FP64 support in and size goes up again. We are still on 40nm process and AMD cannot do magic as some people here think. If they could do magic they would have used it on Barts and Barts really isn't anything special except for the fact that it was designed for the best selling market and that it was designed with just enough SPs to perform well, but not too many as to meet the efficiency "wall".

EDIT: Things about Barts that make me be almost 100% sure that Cayman is not going to be massively faster than Cypress:

From Anandtech:

Compared to Cypress, you’ll note that FP64 performance is not quoted, and this isn’t a mistake. Barts isn’t meant to be a high-end product (that would be the 6900 series) so FP64 has been shown the door in order to bring the size of the GPU down.

However it’s worth noting that internally AMD was throwing around 2 designs for Barts: a 16 SIMD (1280 SP) 16 ROP design, and a 14 SIMD (1120 SP) 32 ROP design that they ultimately went with. The 14/32 design was faster, but only by 2%.

It hints as some shader innefficiency as well as need for higher ROP power. Not really good for Cayman as it could mean that Cayman needs more than 32 ROPs in order to be much faster (like 2x) than Barts, which again makes it too big.

Along with selectively reducing functional blocks from Cypress and removing FP64 support, AMD made one other major change to improve efficiency for Barts: they’re using Redwood’s memory controller. In the past we’ve talked about the inherent complexities of driving GDDR5 at high speeds, but until now we’ve never known just how complex it is. It turns out that Cypress’s memory controller is nearly twice as big as Redwood’s! By reducing their desired memory speeds from 4.8GHz to 4.2GHz, AMD was able to reduce the size of their memory controller by nearly 50%. Admittedly we don’t know just how much space this design choice saved AMD, but from our discussions with them it’s clearly significant.

This means again that Cayman is bigger than Barts for the performance it'd offer. Either 512 bits are used in Cayman along with slow memory, making it big, or the improved Cypress memory controler is used again (or even a bigger one to support 6 gbps memory), which makes it bigger too. Either way bigger.

 

[wahdangun]

i think the biggest market was sub $200 card, but having performance king was necessary , just look at HD 3850 its was cheap sub $200 champion but AMD still losing market share, but after HD 4870 that was performing really good and after HD 4870X2 become performance king amd market share rise rapidly, and with the HD 5870 they surpass nvdia (because nvdia doesn't have any card to compete for almost 6 month)

and btw majority of people still with onboard graphic just take a look at intel market share, so with your logic, we won't even need discrete graphic card because majority of people just enough with onboard graphic

 

[motasim]

i think the biggest market was sub $200 card, but having performance king was necessary , just look at HD 3850 its was cheap sub $200 champion but AMD still losing market share, but after HD 4870 that was performing really good and after HD 4870X2 become performance king amd market share rise rapidly, and with the HD 5870 they surpass nvdia (because nvdia doesn't have any card to compete for almost 6 month)

and btw majority of people still with onboard graphic just take a look at intel market share, so with your logic, we won't even need discrete graphic card because majority of people just enough with onboard graphic

Thanks wahdangun, and you are mostly right, but please note that the market we are referring to is not all of the PC owners/users, but rather the group of these users who are willing to invest in a proper discrete GPU for use in gaming, folding, and/or for professional use. I truly hope that nVidia take some serious steps to properly compete with AMD/ATI to avoid monopolizing the market, which is in the end not to the best interest of us gamers.

 

[Benetanegia]

i think the biggest market was sub $200 card, but having performance king was necessary , just look at HD 3850 its was cheap sub $200 champion but AMD still losing market share, but after HD 4870 that was performing really good and after HD 4870X2 become performance king amd market share rise rapidly, and with the HD 5870 they surpass nvdia (because nvdia doesn't have any card to compete for almost 6 month)

Well yeah the halo effect does exist. Not sure it's so important anymore, but it does exist yet.

and btw majority of people still with onboard graphic just take a look at intel market share, so with your logic, we won't even need discrete graphic card because majority of people just enough with onboard graphic

Like motasim said above, we are talking about graphics cards sales, so obviously we are not talkig about IGP. Also contrary to the common belief, amongst gamers the ASP is $150-300 and not the sub $200 market. Just take a look at Steam's Hardware survey and you'll see a miriad of performance $200-300 cards and very few midrange and low-end cards at the top.