ATI Radeon HD 5970 Review: Uncompromising Monster
 

Some time has passed since AMD’s graphics department introduced the fourth generation of Radeon HD graphics cards. AMD has been doing great through all this time. It has been winning back the ground it had lost to Nvidia previously, the attack unfolding on every front. Such a long chain of victories seems to be unprecedented in the world of consumer 3D graphics hardware and it must have been the result of a properly chosen strategy.

The point of that strategy should be familiar to you if you are interested in PC games and gaming hardware. While Nvidia focused on developing an expensive and complex G200 core, AMD preferred to look for a reasonable compromise between the manufacturing cost and performance, producing the RV770 processor. The outcome was that Nvidia’s 1.4-billion-transistor chip with a 512-bit memory bus proved to be ahead of its time and economically unprofitable whereas AMD’s Radeon HD 4800 series was a real breakthrough and set a new standard for performance of affordable single-processor gaming graphics cards.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...on-hd5970.html