Well you've got a raw 30% increase in horsepower, but you've got a doubling of pixel fill rate and geometry processing.
So in places that weren't geometry or pixel fill rate limited, you've got 30% performance boost(minimum I would think, it's likely some tweaks to each individual rop/tmu/shader/memory controller mean it's a little higher than that), when you were pixel fill rate limited rather than shader limited, you could have up to a 90% boost.
You'd expect that for such a bit boost in pixel/geometry that they felt those were the biggest bottlenecks of the architecture and you can somewhat see this looking at the 7790(if that is what it was called, the not too long ago added newer part).
I'd guess in general 40-60% performance increase depending on the game. It's likely that few to no games were 100% bottlenecked by any particular thing, but that parts of games, moments will be pixel/triangle limited and so with a 30% raw performance increase and some of the time significantly more performance than that we'll see at least 40% performance increase on average.
ROP's is always where I feel Nvidia had the advantage, in "cheaper" shader scenes where the card was less stressed AMD have never quite hit the highs. You look at max framerates which aren't often shown in reviews and you'd often see Nvidia miles out ahead, even if averages were level or behind AMD. Which I think is likely AMD running into the has less rops/lower pixel fill rate situation.
At 24% bigger I'd be surprised if yields weren't a good 30% down on 7970's( you will get quite obviously less cores per wafer if they are each bigger, but any duff cores have a bigger impact on yield percentage wise). More memory and higher cost pcb, higher power draw... I assume but more to the point more memory traces usually ends up a thicker more expensive PCB. So it should cost at least 30% more, the only question is where exactly would the 7970 be priced at with a decent profit today vs 2 years ago as yields have moved forward at TSMC.
Ultimately I'm guessing £350/450 290/290x, with the latter being on average 40-45% faster than the 7970......
The issue with pricing is when companies see loads of people pay obscene prices rather than ignore it till prices drop, it encourages everyone else to do the same. They might go significantly higher in price for a couple months to capture all the people willing to pay way way over the odds then drop the prices to more like £300-350 range for both cards. If people just said a flat no to £800+ Titans, the price would have been WAY down by now, way way down.
It's worth noting that if AMD said anytime before launch "btw these will be awesome prices, £300/£375", then Nvidia would pre-empt the launch and drop prices. If AMD suggest high prices, get reviews and give them prices the day before reviews go live then Nvidia don't have time to adjust pricing and push through price drops before AMD get cards out... and anything they do looks reactive.
