Some of the lucky ones got the cards that they are testing them as we speak, while partners should have the cards ready to ship early next week. We got a hint about the performance, and we will settle for that.
AMD's own benchmarketing data claims that Cayman XT is slightly below 20 percent faster than a GTX 480 in 3Dmark Vantage. When we compare our own GTX 480 results and add 20 percent on top of that it turns that Cayman XT loses to both GTX 570 and especially GTX 580.
It looks like AMD has big gains versus GTX 480 in all OpenGL games including ET Quake Wars, Wolfenstein MP and Chronicles of Riddick, quite old games if you ask us. It is around 20 percent faster than the GTX 480 in these games.
In HAWX 2 Radeon HD 6970 is some 15 percent faster than the GTX 480, and in Dirt 2 it is over 15 percent faster. When we compare the scores we have with this game and GTX 480 and add additional 15 percent we don’t see it beating the GTX 580, but it gets close.
The smallest gain is in Far Cry 2 with only a few percent faster than GTX 480, following with World in Conflict where ATI is below 10 percent faster and Metro 2033 where ATI wins by slightly over 10 percent, again vs GTX 480.
There might be some cases where Radeon HD 6970 will be able to beat the GTX 580, but the first impression is that Nvidia should end up slightly faster in most games.
Update:
It appears that our usually well informed source failed us, and forwarded a photoshopped roadmap. So, we plainly got served. We are in the process of gathering more reliable info on Cayman performance and we will write an update as soon as we get something worthwhile. It will clearly end up quite a bit faster and we apologize for the inconvenience.