So the HD 5970 is out. I like the name. No suffixes whatsoever. Simple, clean, elegant, gets the point across. There's a prefix but that's just to denote the boarder range of GPUs it's a part of. Better than NVIDIA's prefixes, which are really suffixes just moved to the front.
I read a few reviews, and obviously the thing pulverizes the competition, but the competition is a dead horse anyway. Something frustrated me about most of the reviews though: the game selection. It can't be helped, I suppose. Almost all of them are console ports (some with minor enhancements) that never had any problem running in the first place. What's the point benching those games if absolutely no one would be basing their purchasing decision on them? Nobody's thinking "oh man, I need to start doing research for a card that can play Borderlands". Fucking anything can play Borderlands. $100 cards used to be shit but now that'll buy you a 9800GT or equivalent. That's like nothing for a video card budget, and we're talking a card just a smidge under the flagship performance of 2006 (which would normally make it pretty old, but not anymore). So yeah, anything north of toilet paper will run Borderlands, or any of the COD games... or Far Cry 2, or L4D2, or Resident Evil 5, or Batman: Arkham Asylum, or whatever the hell else.
Some people even stopped benching Crysis. Why? I mean yeah, OK, everyone's played through it (except me because I want to do so in its full glory), but it's not like it's irrelevant graphically. People may not care about Crysis performance in particular, but that level of graphical quality hasn't yet been matched, and it's the only game that new graphics card releases can still strain at. The only other games are the badly optimized Call of Juarez DX10 edition, and STALKER games (not as badly optimized but still bad). Maybe, just maybe, something else might come along in the near future that actually strives for IQ at that level, and then we might have a clue what card is more capable when the shaders are really being pushed. If nothing else, Crysis 2!
So the conclusion most places are coming to, unsurprisingly, is that the HD 5970 is overkill. Not even max MSAA is a challenge, if the game supports it (thanks consoles for ever calling that into question). So then there's the extremely limited super-sampling method, or if you're feeling like throwing a big bonfire of money, you can get a few monitors for some Eyefinity action, which much like NVIDIA's 3DVision doesn't work right half the time. They should get both those technologies together for the ultimate in immersion. It might only work for like two games, but it would make those two games the best ones ever.
Will there ever be a card better than the HD 5970? Usually you'd say "of course, that's the natural progression of technology", but I'm not even sure anymore. How would AMD (or NVIDIA) justify it? It costs $600+, it already hits the ceiling of PEG power output, it's damn near the longest card ever, and again, it's freakin overkill for current games. I expect through the usual process shrinks and such that they'll fit its performance into a single chip one day, but I think physical limitations in chip manufacturing and the logistics in the consumer world are slowing down advancements drastically, while game devs simply don't care to blow their budgets putting them to good use. It'll be a while before NVIDIA can release another dual-GPU card, no doubt beyond 2010. Fermi is so large, so complicated, so problematic for its creators to produce that it may well be the last monolithic GPU they make. It's just getting to be too much to maintain these days, and while NVIDIA will probably move their primary source of revenue towards the professional and HPC markets, whose margins may well pull them out of the financial sinkhole of making gigantic chips, I can see them coming to the same realization that AMD has. Smaller chips are just all around better to deal with, and mean all around better margins anyway.
Especially if Fermi ends up being the next FX. If they can't hit their clock targets, and if it doesn't end up being at least 30% faster than the 5870, then combined with the grotesquely late release, they'll have failed this generation completely. Not even their mainstream stuff will save them, because they're already even more behind there.
