Since the thread asks about Fermi, and not a particular part, I would say it is rather shocking the level of improvement they offer over their previous parts. Of course that needs to be explained, but given the design goals in mind it would appear that they have hit all of the performance metrics rather easily that they were shooting for. On the gaming side they have the clearly fastest single GPU overall, but honestly what does that even get you today? One of the things that really stands out when you look at reviews like H offers, 25x16 w/16x AA to strain the cards, really? I'm sure there are people out there that are quite interested in that setup, but the level of diminishing returns past 4x is steep and all of the high end DX11 class parts are handling those settings in pretty much any game with ease. I'm looking at it from a realistic point of view- how much would my end gaming experience change with any of these parts? I use a 19x10 monitor, maybe Metro shows a reasonable difference- a game which doesn't look all that interesting to me personally, the games I'm most likely to play- WoW, BFBC2 and CoD are showing that the nV parts all have a rather decent performance edge in minimums, but the difference is largely splitting hairs as again, there isn't that much of an actual FPS difference.
I am rather interested in the performance of transcoding as I have been spending quite a bit of time doing that(DVD collection in excess of 1K movies) and there it would appear that Fermi is going to end up somewhere in the range of 1000% faster then a 5870, that is something in end effect I would likely notice a bit more then a 5FPS swing on a bench. On a realistic basis most of my gaming time on the PC as of late has been either MMOs or ports of console games, and for that I see no reason to upgrade at all. While I have been spending a lot of time using the GPGPU functions lately, it isn't enough to get me to drop $350 for a new part, I have an older x3 430 machine on the network that isn't used much with a 9600GT in it that can handle that for now. The mid range parts that should be coming, however, will likely be of great interest for me.
Gaming performance of the parts fell almost exactly in line with the overall consensus for performance, only thing really surprising at all with the numbers is how much higher the minimum framerates seem to be in relation to the average compared to the norm. The 470 ended up being a bit faster then the 5850 with the 480 being a bit faster then the 5870 with both parts having a premium over their counterparts. This is very much like it was last generation, anyone trying to push that the situation has changed in some dramatic fashion isn't being honest with themselves. Last gen, nV parts were larger, hotter and used more power then their ATi countperarts. Overall they were slightly faster and had a slight to large price premium over their counterparts from team red. They had a decisive advantage in GPGPU tasks which the overwhelming majority of people don't care about. None of these things have changed.
One interesting thing in this thread, seeing people who were talking about how important DX11 was a month or so ago now saying it doesn't matter. I'll say that my stance hasn't changed in the least, it wasn't a big deal three months ago and it still doesn't really matter now. It is looking like it will be akin to DX10.1 support last generation just with the very miniscule edge going to team green instead of team red.
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