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Sooo... for those of you who care, some comparative benchie thingies of some cards n shit:

3DMark Vantage
XFire 4870s => (P)16344 (X)7611
Single 5870 => (P)19268 (X)9154
XFire 5870s => (P)26244 (X)15485

That STALKER thingy:
XFire 4870s DX10

Single 5870 DX11

XFire 5870s DX11


That Unigine thingy:
XFire 4870s DX10 => FPS: 13.8 Scores: 348
Single 5870 DX11=> FPS: 27.9 Scores: 702
XFire 5870s DX11 => FPS: 51.1 Scores: 1288

Very impressive

-Looks at 5970 and grins wildly.

'cept they don't exist in the real world. Beany's had 2 ... ever ... through the shop. Still, XFire 5870s > 5970

Pats Asus 5870 at 1Ghz/1250

They certainly are rare things, i had to wait six weeks before mine made a showing.

Hawesome card mind.

Nice Results there Maestro,

I've almost pulled the trigger on getting a couple of 5870's. ...several times now

My 280 GTX SLI setup is 2 years old in June, and I'm itching for an graphics upgrade.

But as soon as I saw Fermi with it's 4 triangle setup engines and 16 Tessellation units... ...have to wait to see how it performs in games.

I thought it used the shaders for tesselation rather than a dedicated piece of hardware like the 5800. If so in games with heavy shader use wouldn't the tesselation processing slowdown? While the 5800 would remain at a constant speed due to the dediated hardware????

NVidia have confirmed 16 hardware Tessellation units, one in each 'PolyMorph Engine'... eewww thats such a marketing name....

5870 can setup 1 triangle per clock, but rasterize 2 per clock.

GF100 can setup 4 triangles per clock and rasterize 4 per clock.

Theoretically of course (real life is never that close to perfect )

From what I have read so far, Nvidia seams to be focusing quite a lot on Geometry Performance with Fermi, which is a good thing as so far, since NV30, Pixel Shading has jumped 150x and Geometry only 3x. GF100 looks to have 8x the Geometry Performance of GT200.

Fermi/GF100 seams the largest architectural change for Nvidia since G80

I was under the impression that they had confirmed no dedicated hardware for tesselation and it all had to be done by the shaders.....

wooden ladders, talk to me!

makes you want to feel like a teenager

Umm, well, how does 20 quid sound?

Nope....

See page 13 (GF100 Graphics Whitepaper) :

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/IO_86775.html

Well from all I have read it does use the shaders as the chip was designed for GPGPU work and not specifially as a GPU, so nVidia had to make some changes to incorperate a tessellator and thus had to use the shaders.

The whitepaper you liked to doesn't really specify either way, so we will have to wait until the 26th of March for an answer

That's my view after lurking around various forums and reading up - dedicated unit or using shaders, it'll work nicely if any game can be programmed to make use of it other than that "heaven" benchmark.

Isn't this the whole probem with Nvidia's approach in the first place? Games and engines aren't written for GPPPPPUs, they're written for GPUs and DirectX. Also, very few games are actually written for the PC nowadays, they'#re all multi-platform and big games houses aren't going to spend the extra wonga re-developing a game for GPPPPPPPUs when they can just port to DirectX in a flash.

Yup, nVidia have gone down a path that creates an uber bit of processing hardware, but doesn't necessarily make an awesome gaming GPU.

While also making you pay through the nose for hardware you will probably never use to its full potential.

HeX. Did you just agree with me? There've been enough earthquakes this week

lol