The sudden silence of Apoppin leads me to believe I'm getting too close to the answers............
What do you think guys?

IMO apoppin either has or will soon have a 6990 and a GXT 550 Ti or whatever it's called. I highly doubt that nVidia has another midrange part in the works. If anything, we will see some low end stuff, perhaps even a "530" or something.

So you think Nvidia is going to leave the 6850/6870 market? The gtx460 is on its way out as we type. Thats a big performance gap between the gtx550 and gtx560ti.

The lineup would look something like this.

gtx580 500$
6970, 360$
gtx570, 320$
6950, 260$
gtx560, 240$---------
6870, 215$ .............. Big gap here.
6850, 170$
gtx550 145$---------
5770 115$

Either this gtx550 is going to be faster then expected or they have a big gap in the mid range lineup.

nvm

Are you sure that the GTX 460 is being discontinued as of right now? I've heard that nVidia plans to keep making them for the foreseeable future.

I have also heard some people saying that once the GTX 550 Ti is out, nVidia will discontinue the GTX 460, so I'm not sure which rumor to believe.

Really though, if the GTX 550 can keep pace with a 6850, nVidia has nothing to worry about.

At 900MHz, but with 16 ROP's, it'd still come short of HD 5830. Sure, it'll beat 5770, but still be closer to 5770 than 5830.

If we look at the pattern here, NV wants to release GF116 before releasing an "SE" version of GF114, like they did with releasing GTS 450 first before GTX 460 SE. They probably do not want to do another "768 MB" version again, since the prices just plummet on the low RAM version. The prices are held very close to the dear heart, oh yea!

Really, NV just wants to beat 5770 by just a clear enough margin with this GTX 550 Ti (while following AMD's route of upgrading the name/number moniker a bit "too much" like 5870-->6870, GTS450 --> GTX550 Ti), to provoke AMD's response and see if AMD has any loose cards up the sleeve (HD 6830 -- what AMD desperately needs as a buffer to help keep the 6850's prices up).

Then NV will know how high to clock the fully unlocked GF116 and try to ultimately win out on the lower mid-range 40nm round (if AMD plays it "soft" as expected with the 6830, letting it be like the 5830 rather than really close to 6850). By then, NV will likely have already released an SE version of GTX 560 and discontinued GF104, but NV really hopes to catch a glimpse of AMD's hand before doing this. Personally, I'd like to see the 6930 come out and draw a stalemate with GTX 560 Ti, but AMD isn't known for showing their guts--AMD is usually too subtle in a UFC match.

If the timing is off, or gets messy for either one of the companies, then expect a flood of different models like with the 9800GSO, 8800GS, 9800GS, X1900GT rev.2, 7900GTO, 7800GS, etc.. (it'd be GTX 560 SE, GTX 555 Ti, GTX 560 TiSE, whatever blah blah..) I'd hate to have to add all of those cards to my voodoopower ratings list.

This is the second time this has happened .. i went to take a nap.
- - - i didn't sleep very well last night and i am doing the final proofing on my CF vs SLI eval (yes, *Still* working on it) .. then i had to write to AMD about that HardOCP article
.. and i got an answer

And Nvidia rarely EoL's something until the stock is nearly gone and its replacement is selling well

6830 ha? never heard much about this card, seems to be the perfect gtx550 killer.

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... 2540288SPs)


"We refer to the Radeon HD 6830, based on core Barts THE solution that will position just behind the Radeon HD 6850 (Barts PRO). The technical characteristics of this new card take over the HD 6850, but with a number of stream processors and lower clock frequencies. There is talk of 800 SPs (organized in 10 with 40 SIMDs TMUs and 32ROPs) and a clock frequency of 725MHz for the GPU and 900 MHz (3600MHz effective) for video memory bus with GDDR5 sempre a 256-bit. Always a 256-bit. "

Love your voodoo charts by the way great work.

Thank you, happymedium!

If I were AMD, I'd release the 6830 that performs right at around 100 Voodoopower, or as close to 6850 as possible. That way, it's completely untouchable by a fully unlocked GF116 (probably to be called GTX 555 Ti), and obliterates both GTX 460-768 and GTX 460 SE, while serving as a buffer to keep the 6850 "up there" in pricing. NV knows that 6850 beats GTX 460 1GB, and could easily replace it with GTX 560 SE that runs faster, and then aggressively price it down like they did with GTX 460-768.

If AMD wants to halve the ROP's on the Barts chip like with the 5830, AMD would need to make sure that it has all of the 1120sp, and leave it running at over 820MHz, since the bandwidth in addition to ROP's would also be gravely affected in real-world tests, i.e. color-fill rate (even if AMD claims the bus to still be 256-bit). In a few cases, it might beat 6850, but usually lose most of the time.

Two other options would be to:
1) Do a castrated 800sp part and retain all of the 32 ROP's, but clock it high, at over 850MHz. Nvidia is hoping that AMD takes this route. The clock would be pretty much the same as HD 5770, with the same number of sp's (except that it's improved VLIW4 instead of VLIW5, plus 32 ROP's and 256-bit bus. Think HD 4890 with 32 ROP's and VLIW4. It would end up faster than HD 5830 overall.

2) Just simply reduce the clocks on Barts Pro 6850 by ~ 50MHz and call it 6830. This one would piss Nvidia off. It might even draw a tie with GTX 460 1GB. At least it's not as bad as X1900XT being only 25MHz slower, but $100 cheaper than X1900XTX.

Heck, AMD could do two of the above 3 options, or even do all of those just to flood the market like with X1950GT, X1900GT, X1950GT Rev.2 and so on! Let's see how messy this gets.. (or not). It's not ATI anymore.

i am surprised that no one has commented on the 8-pin+8-pin PCIe connector shown on the HD 6990 at HardOCP.

You think it is for show?
- or are we finally going to break the 300W spec for a single video card?