Wow, this is like my 2nd post?
I see a lot of petty arguements here.
FACT:
This is a lifting of the NDA but done very differently. There is no product yet. The boards are for PR only. In essence, what we have here is most definitely careful marketing to disrupt confidence in the ATI 5xxx series and deflect it to the 'monster on the horizon'.
Yes there is substantial info here but why show only certain things, such as a 'portion' of the DX11 bench? Why not the score over the entire engine? Is Charlie right in his assertion at semi-accurate that as tesselation is shared then when the GPU is processing other articles it will slow down. (i.e. an optimum benchmark example has been given).
Also, no power info. The card is power hungry. Charlie was wrong about why Fermi and Oak ridge aren't happening (it's political and green) but the power consumption of HPC's is an issue here. For ref, CD stated Fermi was too hungry for power to be used - not true according to sources at BSN*.
This card is late for some very worrying reasons. It was slated to hit the christmas market way back in Sept 09 but it has slipped worryingly far back. That directly infers either a defect in some process or it had to be reworked to better ATI's offering (or both).
To discuss now if the card is better than the HD 5xxx series is a moot point. Is it more powerful? - almost definitely. Is it faster than a HD 5870? - almost definitely true. Is it faster than a HD 5970? Unknown but probably by a small margin.
But what we also have to consider is it's heat output (it's a massive die), it's cooling solution (for noise comparisons) and most importantly, it's price. It's going to be more than a HD 5970 or be sold at a loss, surely.
And please folks, dont forget, this is an Nvidia marketing release. It's 100% biased in it's delivery. There will be many elements of GF 100 that aren't palatable but you'll not hear about it from NV. NO company undersells itself.
So, I say, accept that if it makes it to the light if day it'll be:
Very Powerful, Very hot, noisy and prohibitively expensive. And dont forget to use 3D vision on more than one screen you need more than one 120Hz monitor. Aston Martin make great cars.... but they're in chronic debt because not enough people buy them.
Watch this space.