BF3 on ultra with 4xMSAA and Metro 2033 on ultra with 4xAA use more than 1GB of VRAM @ 1080P. Without minimums frames you can't use a 560 getting a higher average FPS, a card that in many cases is faster than a 5870, as some sort of indicator that they are not bottoming out and hitting VRAM walls.
Multi-threaded rendering enabled drivers make a
massive difference in Civ 5.
Explain this one to me, you think this is just raw performance and not something else ?
I mean really, you think this is just raw performance at work in what is an incredibly underwhelming game if you are just looking on the visuals ? If you want to talk extreme tessellation, the 480 jumping ahead in Crysis 2 looks reasonable considering the ample usage of tessellation in this game, but 100% faster in B:AC ? And you are using this to find your overall average ?
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, we knew the 480 was about 20% faster than a 5870 overall when it released almost 2 years ago and again now because you wanted to remind everyone, but your overall summation is incorrect as it's being skewed by said outliers. What is your point in this exactly ? Are you saying you expect when nvidia releases a 28nm DX11 card that this same pattern is going to be followed ? Or do you just want to talk about cards released 2 to 2 1/2 years ago, again ?
In BF3, GTX560ti 1GB is faster than HD6950 2GB and GTX570 1250MB is faster than HD6970 2GB. NO, BF3 doesnt need more than 1GB buffer at 1080p Ultra, otherwise GTX560 would not be faster than HD6950 2GB.
About Civ 5
Everyone talks about the Multithreading drivers. I havent seen anyone quoting Ryan's latest evaluation about Civ 5 performance in HD7970 review. Let me quote it here,
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review
If Civilization V was solely a DCL test, then our 2560 results would be impossible – the 7970 is winning by 12% in a game NVIDIA previous won by a massive margin. NVIDIA only regains their lead at 1680, which at this resolution we’re not nearly as likely to be GPU-bound.
So what changed? AMD has yet to spill the beans, but short of a secret DCL implementation for just CivV we have to look elsewhere. Next to DCL CivV’s other killer feature is its use of compute shaders, and GCN is a compute architecture. To that extent we believe at this point that while AMD is still facing some kind of DCL bottleneck, they have completely opened the floodgates on whatever compute shader bottleneck was standing in their way before. This is particularly evident when comparing the 7970 to the 6970, where the 7970 enjoys a consistent 62% performance advantage. It’s simply an incredible turnabout to see the 7970 do so well when the 6970 did so poorly.
About Batman: AC
Batman Arkham City uses the same Unreal Engine by Epic, as Arkham Asylum, but thanks to the engine's modularity, it has been overhauled, outfitted with the latest technologies, including a graphics engine that takes advantage of DirectX 11.
Clearly the latest
Unreal Engine 3 with DX-11 needs massive amounts of compute power, something Evergreen(HD5870) lacks.
Take for instance the HD6970 vs HD7970. GCN was designed for GPGPU, that gives it a huge boost in games with DX-11.
In Batman: AC HD7970 is 64% faster than HD6970.
Fermi architecture was designed for GPGPU and DX-11, it has much more compute power than HD5870, that is the reason of the huge performance difference in Batman: AC.
Do you start to see a pattern here ?? in both of this games (Civ 5 and Batman: AC), HD7970 is 60%+ faster than HD6970.
About Shogun 2
By what you are saying, i shouldn't have put Shogun 2 in the mix. HD5870 has the same performance with GTX580, really ??
Why you didnt say anything about that game ?? Well it seams that the developers made a nice job coding the game for VLIW architectures and you know what ?? that's fine by me, because there are a lot of people with AMD cards playing that game.
Just because one game perform way faster than the other card, we dont discard it from benchmarks. It really shows us the
differences in Graphics Card Architectures. If you dont like to see the differences or you dont play that game/games dont count them. But when we evaluate the performance of a card we need to take in to consideration all current DX-11 games.
Most of the DX-11 games will need more compute power in the near future. GNC is the right direction but im afraid that Tahiti is not enough to compete with GK100. Because of that, GK104, a middle end NV card could perform very close with 79xx series in those DX-11 games.
2012 is a DX-11 year, and you wont see the same small performance differences we had in 2009-2010 with DX-9 games in the mix. If GK100 will double its compute power it will have significant more performance in those DX-11 games than Tahiti. AMD will have to design a bigger chip some time in the near future in order to compete in DX-11 games and in GPGPU.