Why does 8800gtx beat 2900xt

Alright so i was searching for a new video card, however i realized that 2900xt has better specs than the 8800gtx and yet it cant beat 8800gtx.
R600 80nm PCIe x16 1024mb of mem 743mhzcore 1000mhz memclock 128.0gb/s gddr4
g80 90nm PCIe x16 768mb 575core 1350 memclock 86.40gb/s gddr3

To me it just seems kinda odd. Also what would be better for long term 2900xt or 8800gtx cause i hear two different things, one says 8800gtx cause its beating the 2900xt and others say wait till the drivers mature for 2900xt.

Well, I'm pretty sure there's more to performance than memory bandwidth and stream processors.

A lower clocked C2D can beat an AMD X2... but you didn't question how that's possible. I'm sure part of Nvidia's advantage is their mature drivers... and perhaps it's just a more efficient GPU (just like a C2D can beat an X2 clock for clock)

Drivers as well though.

but make sure you dont trust any single review, always read about 3 since they can easily be biased and you wouldn't know (and that includes articles on THG)

I like oranges but I have a bunch of apples

It's mostly a function of architecture. The 8800 is scalar and the 2900 is 5x superscalar.

Think of it this way...This is just a rough example of why it works this way...

The 8800 can do 1 instruction in 1 second.
The 2900 can theoretically do 5 instructions in 3 seconds.

It would seem that the 2900 is much faster, and theoretically it is.
However, in real situations the 2900 can only load up 2 or 3 instructions on average so often it does less work in the same time as the 8800.

Improving the drivers helps it load more instructions at a time. It was usually doing 2 instructions when it came out, as drivers have improved the average is closer to 3 so the performance has been moving from 8800gts to 8800gtx in benchmarks.

All of these numbers are made up this is simply an example of how the scalar and 5x superscalar works.

that explains it a bit more thank you steven zwickel. So it cld be possible that the 2900xt with mature drivers can beat gtx? or wld that still be a long shot. I just kind of find it interesting . and i remember the p4 and amd thing, more operations per cycle and what not however seeing that 2900 can do 5 ops in 3 seconds equaling to about 1.667 ops a second compared to gtx 1 per 1 it would still seem to me that 2900 would still win. sorry if that didnt make any sense im just way too tired lol. Thanks for your replies tho.

Whell, you should go with the GTX, you cant say witch card is more impressive with the specs in the paper. 320 stream procesors in the ATI card are not more than 128 on the GTX, its just a matter of precision and the way of measuring the raw performance, drivers may not be doing their work very well but the gap in performance its not only due to them. In my opionion the nVidia chip is a more balanced design and a much more efficient one, maybe it was better thought by nvidia engineers or maybe Ati ones just had bad luck in the design process, the results are that GTX performs in another league than the R600 right now, wait until new R600 revisions come out becouse if they poolys their design it can become a really great card!.

One reason the 8800GTX performs better is that it has more Texture Mapping Units and Raster Operations Pipeline, 32 and 24 respectively. While the HD 2900XT has only 16 and 16. Drivers are probably the other big issue on the performance difference, and we are still seeing performance improvements from the HD 2000 series cards with new driver releases.

Heat does equal waste in any application that is not expressly meant to produce heat (e.g. a furnace) In the case of the furnace, light would be the wasted energy.

High efficiency PSUs should run cooler because they're converting a higher % of the incoming AC to DC... the remainder being lost to heat.

Ok, I'm rambling... I guess I was agreeing with Evilonigiri.