Cheat Engine

[Phox]

Apparently, nvidia cards need less stream processors and slower clock speeds to have the same the same performance as equivalent "quality" (price) ati gpus?

Why is a geforce 295 that $200 more than a 5850? The ati gpu has 1440 stream processors @ 725 mhz and the geforce has 480 stream processors @ 550 or so mhz. What is going on here? Are nvidia sp's of some different class than ati sp's?

[superweapons]

The unified shader architecture standard introduced with DirectX 10 is flexible. Unified shader architecture combines pixel, vertex, and geometry shaders together (which is why on older cards you will see the separate standards, such as Pixel Shader 2.0). The standard is flexible in the idea that engineers could design the shader processors however they wanted so long as they could mainly perform all 3 aforementioned shader functions. So ATI chose to use large cluster of shader processors (varying in size based on model, some up to 160 per cluster) that are locked at 1:1 with the primary GPU SIMD core clock. NVIDIA designed their 8-series GPU using smaller shader clusters (also varying in size) that run at around 1.5-2.5x the primary GPU SIMD core clock speed and can be unlocked (so you can separately adjust shader processor clocks).
In your GTX 295 vs. HD 5850 example, the shader processors on the GTX 295 are separately clocked at 1.29GHz, over double its core clock. The HD 5850's shaders are clocked at the same speed as its primary GPU core, 725MHz. The HD 5800-series' shaders are clusterd in groups of 160, whereas GT200 uses 24-count shader clusters. Outside of clockspeed, NVIDIA shaders are a bit faster I would assume as well.

TL;DR: NVIDIA's shader processors are clustered differently and are designed for higher individual performance compared to ATI's.

The price difference between the GTX 295 and HD 5850 is because not only was GT200 expensive to produce, but they're being phased out in turn for the introduction of GTX 400/Fermi in late March.

[Shota]

Also, March 26 for Fermi
Hurray