Nvidia and ATI Shaders are just something you cannot compare. Nvidia’s highest end GTX 280 card has 240 Shaders clocked at 1.1GHz, while ATI’s R770XT / PRO have an amazing 800 Shaders clocked at 750MHz.

These two technologies are simply incomparable, as sometimes ATI’s architecture wins while sometimes Nvidia wins; but this depends from case to case. ATI’s second chance to get a performance and spec crown is, of course, the R700, as this dual chip card will end up with an astonishing number of 1600 Shaders and this is the number that should enable ATI to win against GTX 280 cards.

It takes a lot of Shaders to win against Nvidia’s GT200 chip, but from a silicon point of view it’s much cheaper and efficient to produce two smaller chips and make a high-end card out of them.

Just look what Intel does with its quad-core CPUs, which are technically two dual-cores stitched together. No one really complains because it works and it is currently the fastest CPU you can buy.