Its been said SOOOOO many times before, but every day it's more and more true -
late, yield issues, power hungry, reduced clockspeeds, completely new architecture paradigm, massive theoretical perf. but lack of real world perf due to design flaws, drivers tweaked for a specific, fixed bench (2900xt was 3dm06 champ), which then failed to perform nearly as well in real games. IT REEKS OF 2900XT.
one company took the plunge for dx 10 (ATI and VLIW, cluster shaders, tesselation, etc etc) while the other adopted a very 1900XT-type architecture, and held back dx10 in the name of performance. the company that took the plunge ended up losing massively... this time its nv taking the plunge to a completely new gpu design and ATi playing it safe (and benefiting from their previous plunge) in the name of performance.
I expect the Gf100 to be exactly a 2900XT with better marketing... everything feels the same. Even the leaked benches show a similar trend: Low performance in all but one benchmark and fanboys screaming "ITs THE DRIVERS WAIT FOR TEH VLIW... err.... 4 ISSUE GPU THINGY DRIVERS!!1!11!"
Not gonna happen... this gen will be a D O G. It may be a nice product for the price, and I am 80% sure I will buy one, because I am a slave to nvidia, but unseat a 5970 it will not. (IMO)
EDIT: @ EastCoasthandle thats a great point about the bench - the unigine definitely looks tweaked. Point is a fixed bench is a fixed bench... anyone can tweak a driver to do well in a FIXED bench bc they know exactly what conditions the card will face and when... much like the 2900XT just ROCKED at 3dm06 but got beat even by a 1900XTX in some cases in the real world. That heaven benchie looks nothing more than a driver hack.