How come a 5970 is better than a 6970?

[PESolution]

So i just stumbled across the fact that a 5970 is more powerful than a 6970, though the name suggests to me that the 6970 is newer so should be better?

Am I being stupid?

 

[QwaF]

They changed the naming system. The 5970 is a dual GPU card, the 6970 is a single GPU card.

 

[max51]

The 5970 is a dual core card and the 6970 is only a single core.
The 5970 is basicaly 2 5870's on a single PCB. The same as the 6990 is two 6970's on one card.

 

[PESolution]

Ahh I see, thanks - seems a bit stupid to change the name if only to confuse people

 

[555BUK]

Ahh I see, thanks - seems a bit stupid to change the name if only to confuse people

Correct. It was a marketing ploy to con unsespecting punters out of their money. The 6900 series offers very little over the 5800 and 5900 series they replaced.

5700 to 6800 offered pretty good performance gains.
5800/5900 to 6900 equals Emperor's new clothes (some slight tweaks but nothing worth upgrading for).

 

[The Asgard]

Correct. It was a marketing ploy to con unsespecting punters out of their money. The 6900 series offers very little over the 5800 and 5900 series they replaced.

5700 to 6800 offered pretty good performance gains.
5800/5900 to 6900 equals Emperor's new clothes (some slight tweaks but nothing worth upgrading for).

Unless you ran out of VRAM.

 

[Meaker]

6990 offers a huge advantage over the 5970 due to massively improved crossfire scaling.

 

[mame]

I always thought it was a bit misleading to release a 6850 that was a touch slower than a 5850 when many people would presume it's ~30% faster.

 

[Rroff]

I can kinda see why they did it - a long time after the fact, with the 6->7 series the change to the naming is starting to make sense, but really wasn't a good way to go about it. Confused a large number of consumers.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

Yeah, as others said they went crazy and changed the names. 5970 is now the 6990