I've come down to two theories as to why Nvidia made the G71 a 24 pipeline solution instead of the 32 pipeline solution that they're more than capable of doing. It's either because the G71 was designed for the PS3, and the desktop version just happened to be cheap; or because a 32 pipe solution wouldn't be as cost effective when compared to a 24 pipe solution like the current G71. A 32 pipeline G71 would cost $500 for a 7900gt, rather than just $300, and since it would use so many transistors, wouldn't clock very high or offer a large performance increase.

What I can't figure out is why the r520 and r580 are designed the way they are. A 16 pipeline r520 should have fewer transistors than a 24 pipeline G70, right? Apparently having 8 fewer pipelines actually adds another 18 million transistors to the die. The extra performance on the r520 actually comes from a high clock speed due to a small 90nm process, compared to 110nm on the G70, and because of the high memory bandwidth on the x1800xt. The advantage is taken away, though, when the 7800gtx 512MB shows up with slightly faster memory, slightly slower core, and about a 30% increase in performance while still using fewer transisitors. When you shrink the die on the G70 and give it that extra bandwith, like with the G71, you have still fewer transistors and a 30% performance gain, but this time while using less electricity and a smaller heatsink.

The r580 carries the same problem, but this time it also has triple the number of pixel shaders. Now, you would think that increasing the number of pixel shaders by 300% would double the performance at the very least. Instead, all the extra shaders just use up more transistors, making the chip more expensive and hotter than it's predecessor while only adding a 30% performance increase. When compared to it's competition, it offers slightly more performance while using a lot more electricity and producing a lot more heat with it's 100 million extra transistors. Someone once told me that ATI didn't want to have to increase the number of TMUs because they were all ready 1.5x as effective as the previous generation, so that 16 TMUs from the r580 is just as good as 24 from the competition. If that were true, then why not increase the number of TMUs to maximize performance? And why is it that all the pixel shaders off no performance increase over the competition when paired with 16 TMUS that act like 24 of the competitions?

The only advantages the r500 series cards have over their Nvidia counterparts is faster, higher quality AF, which doesn't really drop performance that much, and AA, while it's really hard to tell the different between 2xAA and anything higher than that. They also have the ability to use AA while using HDR in all 3, count them, 3 games that support it, and 3dMark06. Then, there is Avivo. All the benchmarks I've seen say PureVideo is superior, and even if that changes in the future, I don't see spending $300 for a video card to tell your friends about how pretty your DVDs look.  Then, people keep saying how future proof they are, but what do they offer over the G80 and r600 generations?  Furture games will use more pixel shaders?  Says who, other than ATI?  DirectX 10 requires 1 TMU for every pixel shaders, not 1 TMU for every 3 pixel shaders.  Will the r580 offer better performance on DX10 games?  What's the point in that?

I wish, for ATI, that the problems were only with the r520 and r580 high end cards, but all their cards have these problems, too. The rv530 shares the same problems as the r580, but in the midrange. 12 pixel shaders doesn't come close to beating 12 pixel pipelines, and really has a hard time beating the 8 pixel pipelines on the 6600gt. The x1800gto would be worth something, if it were cheaper and could overclock as well as the 7600gt. The x1300 is really the only thing that beats the competition in everything, at least until the 6600gt goes down further in price.

I'm just having trouble in seeing why ATI thought the architecture for the r580 and r520 and everything below was a good idea.