260m GTX vs 9800m GS , only33% FPS increase?

I am a bit confused. From what I’ve read, the 260m GTX gives about 33% better FPS in games versus the 9800m GS. But, the 260m GTX has nearly twice the cores (64 vs 112) and at least the same clock frequency or higher. So, why only 33% increase in FPS if nearly double the crunchers?
Would u see more % increase in CUDA than gaming? Like 80% better FLOPS?

 

Actually correct that... It is because the GTX 260M is a rebadged 9800M GTX. Therefore, it is still running on the GeForce 9M architecture. Therefore, it is like comparing the 9800M GS to the 9800M GTX so to speak. CUDA support was added in by drivers, but the architecture was still a GeForce 9M lot. Therefore, in that series, I guess adding in more SP's doesn't mean you get 50% more performance. Both cards were crippled slightly by their potential due to GDDR3 VRAM and boosting clock speed to the VRAM didn't really help since nVidia was already pushing the tolerance levels of the GDDR3 VRAM limit.

 

So.. the reason is because they cores are starved of data. Ok. Yeah the 9m video cards are CUDA 1.1 and I can see how the 260 is very similar to the 9m series.
So twice the cores equals just 33% more crunchness because of starved cores?
Thanks

 

In games (especially older ones) there are also other factors that come into play, like ROPs and TMUs. These come in the same numbers in 260M GTX and 9800M GS.

 

What are ROPs and TMUs? CPU-related processing?

Why don't they put GDDR5 RAM on the midrange cards then. I know the price and energy consumption would go probably up but it seems like they are wasting silicon by putting transistors in the core that can't stay busy..

 

Huh? They didn't have GDDR5 when the 260M was released. And they do use GDDR5 on midrange. It's on the 460M and should be on one of the variations of the 560M.

 

ROP stands for Raster OPerator (filtering, AA), TMU stands for Texture Mapping Unit (conversion from the texture's pixel format to float4, filtering with neighbouring texels according to the sampler settings, and possibly special functions like the native shadow mapping depth comparison).