I understand i7monkey's sentiments. You would think that with premium prices, you should get premium performance, and I don't think it's wrong to demand that.
Unfortunately, history has shown us time and time again that the jump from generation to generation is not likely to yield 100% performance in the least. The closest we have ever gotten to that mythical figure may be the jump from the Radeon 8500 to the Radeon 9700 Pro or from the GeForce 7900GTX to the 8800GTX. Those examples are few and far between, and it makes sense because those jumps were accompanied by
significant changes in GPU architectural design. Nowadays, current GPU's are mostly further revisions on "older" architectures. The G92 and it's myriad of variants are a good example of a great design that just refuses to die.
However, I, and many others, feel the expectations towards the HD6990 and GTX 590 have been sorely misplaced. We've known from the get-go that these cards were going to be high-end dual-GPU designs that fit on a single slot. If the single-GPU cards are already hot, loud, and power hungry as they are, what was supposed to change to make these dual-GPU cards any different? If there is any truth at all, it's that every generation has grown to be more and more power hungry, which ultimately requires better cooling due to the increased heat output. The only reason why we even need 1000+W power supplies in the first place is because of video cards; no other high end component consumes nearly as much power at full load!
Furthermore, if you really think about it, there just aren't that many games out there that truly do push the limits of games that necessitate tremendous leaps in performance. Benchmarks that all these review sites present showcase only just a handful of games that are actually available. The majority of other games out there either strike a fine balance between performance and hardware utilization, or are straight up console ports.
But to play the devil's advocate, the flip side is that there is the (rather) crowd which will whine and moan when games become
*TOO* challenging. Every so often, when a game comes along that demolishes every bleeding edge system in sight over the next few years, people are outraged and cry "poor coding."
Crysis was one such unfortunate victim that was lambasted for its lasting impact. It goes down in infamy as a defacto benchmark/tech demo as opposed to an actual game that attained technical greatness for its time.
So really, you can't please everybody. As is the case with bleeding edge enthusiast cards such as the HD6990 and GTX590, if you have to question its value, it just isn't for you.
