Ah this game again. So because the 5870 was slower than the 295 that made it boring?
I think you are just baiting and that is boring. Tomorrow we shall see eh?
I have to concur here, single-gpu cards are what impress me most. Dual-gpu cards are great and performance crown is awesome to have but I like the ultra-fast single-gpu cards.
5870 was an awesome launch and GTX 480 was not much so in my book because it was not much faster than the 5870. The same will repeat again with 28nm cards. You can bet a solid $100

that NV is going to do their best to not get beaten to the punch again on 28nm.
It looks like the best thing AMD or NV can do for sales or momentum is be first to market with new cards on a new process, 5870 was great evidence of that.
None of this is to say 6970/6950 are crap. Once again AMD will give stellar performance much cheaper than NV, and force NV to cut their prices and profits. Just would of been nice if they didn't wimp out and just put out a monster die 6970 beast. I guess it has something to do with their business model that they prefer to hit the top-tier bracket with dual-gpu cards.
AMD may very well likely retain the crown with the 6990, we may not see a dual-gpu from NV if they can only manage to put two 560s on a card, it will likely not be faster than a 6990 and not worth releasing. AMD's strategy may have found a loophole in NV's monster-die approach where they can put out a dual-gpu card that can out perform NV's best and NV cannot counter due to their monster dies.