I had a 6000 series card that wasnt even PCI which is over 10 years ago.
I owned the fastest GPU's of nearly every generation from both ATI and Nvidia.
Pricing has gone silly on both sides but one thing has always been clear. ATI/AMD drivers are always crap. Take my friends 6990 which has taken 18 months to get drivers that extract the full performance out of the card on games that are nearly 18 months old.
My old 4870 X2 was just the same. i would play a game on max getting 40-60 FPS consistently and then 1 year later i would come back to that game and be hitting 60-80 FPS because ATI had finally gotten their act together with the CF drivers.
Now this is all well and good but i had finished that game a year ago and the performance gains are wasted. Not only that it was time to upgrade to a new GPU since the newer single GPU cards are beating my 4870 X2 hands down.
So its a lose/lose scenario. Im paying for a cutting edge CF set up only to basically get no benefit from the 2nd GPU until the game is redundant and the card is playing 2nd fiddle to better cards.
When i checked into the poor performance i found out there were no CF profiles for the AAA games that everyone wanted to play until most people had finished playing them.
At least Nvidia gets the SLI profiles out within a month to give you the benefit of the 2nd GPU as quickly as possible.
You only have to look at the specs of a 7970 and a 680 GTX. Look at the number of shaders and the clock speed and the 3GB vs 2GB of Vram and the huge memory bandwidth of the 7970 to see that something doesnt add up??
Why does the GPU with the best specs lose nearly all the time to the 680 GTX and some times to even the 670 GTX?
Because Nvidia always extracts more from its GPU via its drivers. 3 years down the road the 7990 will still be getting drivers from AMD which increases performance on games that are no longer relevant.
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