Ohhhhhh...... The disappointment. Can't wait to hear the AMD camps "It's all about price/performance" AND "But our cards are'nt as hot as a Fermi Nuclear Reactor in breach mode". Except that according to the review, the 6970 is about as hot under load as the old GTX480.... Looks like AMD camps are going to have the temperatures they were joking about on the original Fermi come back and bite them on the ass so they will have to revise their comments this time around.
Nevertheless, competition in this industry is great for everyone as it always results in aggressive pricing so a big welcome thanks goes out to both AMD and Nvidia in this round for giving all of us such powerful cards at more affordable prices...... In the end, isn't that what we all want?

They used Catalyst 10.11 for the HD 6970. They should have benched with 10.12 at least. Notice how HD 5870 stomps the HD 6970 in Battleforge? Certainly an obvious sign of an unoptimized driver for the HD 6970. A correct optimized driver can make all the difference.

Disappointing? It's marginally faster than the GTX570! The games where it looked 20-30% behind are obviously driver issues. Also, after all what hype? Which hype was that? Virtually everybody I read was saying they were waiting to see what kind of performance this would deliver, and it produces better performance than even the unexpected NVidia card released just days before, while consuming less power. How's that disappointing? NVidiot, are we?

For the prices, the new cards are decent. Obviously the 580's temps will be with the throttled speed, so I don't think they will as low as the reported temp during normal use. But I gotta agree, had I needed to upgrade, now is really a great time to upgrade or build a new computer, since prices are very competitive.

The way I see this card
-Performs slightly better than the GTX570 (save for obvious beta driver-related performance problems, such as in Battleforge)
-Draws less power than its competitor, the GTX570
-Is as quiet as the GTX580 (according to TPU)
-Is priced slightly (~$20) higher than the GTX570 (Going by egg prices)

I'm not sure what there is to be disappointed about. The card does what it's supposed to.

The 570 and 580 throttle in Furmark so the power draw isn't accurate. They would be close to the 470 and 480 without the regulation.

Some other review sites also gave synthetic test result numbers which surprised and confused me a bit. The 6970 pumped out around 18k with the 570/580 shelling around 25-28k. Synthetic as it may be other sites indicate the 6970 tops out close to the 570 and comes close to the 580 in dx11 syths and games. It would seem that older dx10 apps appear to lag with this card and just maybe a newer driver may just provide a 15% or maybe more increase. IDC tho fps are still awesome with this card as is xfire scaling.

Lmao @ AMD fanboys crying into their cornflakes!

I thought 6970 was gonna be only 5% behind GTX 580 - turns out to be 20% behind, with even GTX 570 beating it. No wonder AMD has been FORCED (by their own FAILURE) to slash prices at launch.

Add to that the fact 6970 is hotter than 5870, much hotter than GTX 580 and only slightly cooler than GTX 480; then add much higher power consumption and higher noise level than 5870 -

All of this adds up to one thing - if you own AMD shares, sell now as Nvidia is set stomp on AMD at least until we see 28nm. AMD's fortunes are headed south for the rest of 40nm, especially given that Nvidia has dual card GTX 595 waiting in the wings to hand 6990 its hat in January.

Given the results Radeon 6970 is targeting same market space as GTX 570. This will push price drop of the latter, which are very good news for everyone interesting to upgrade to CUDA supporting card (which are all 3D designers willing to speedup renderng time by use of iRay technology in 3DS Max or other 3D software).

I'm looking for a replacement card, so I'm doing some 'layman research'. One thing captured my mind: Ati's best still uses 256 bit wide memory bus, like it used it on the good ol' 9700 (if my memory serves well). This 256 bit wide bus limits the theoretical mem. bandwidth of any Ati card, because on this 6970 they already using the fastest(?) gddr5 chips (6GHz effective clock). Nvidia, on the other hand uses only 4 and 5 GHz chips, but their memory bus width is variable (like the GPU chip capabilities/performance), they use(d) anything between (64?) 128-512, and their 580 has more memory bandwidth with slower ram chips than Ati/AMD. Till now the faster speed of the new GPU's always depended on the evolution of ram chips (NV 6800 -> 8/9800 / 280/285 bandwidth doubled, perf. too). Future Ati chips will need more bus width or they will be bottlenecked even with the fastest ram, NV on the other hand if they do an '580' with the 285's 512 bit wide bus + Hynix's best (by the 400/500 specs an NV with 2 GB ram would use an 512 bus), the 6GHz eff. ram chip then they will have a whopping 375 GByte/s memory bw.

I think the lowest, average, and highest FPS for each of the graphics cards should be benched as I have read that the 6000 series, although not exceeding in most FPS, does exceed in the least FPS, which is often times the most important in gaming.