[citation][nom]Dandalf[/nom]No, if you read the review, you'd know that the GTX 680 is the "gamer focused" card that purposefully sacrifices compute, and that the other high end kepler cards will focus more on it. Also, rebranding is one thing; calling three different cards the same thing is just taking the mickey.[/citation]
... The Radeon 7000 cards are all good for compute, even the Pitcairn and Cape Verde cards that aren't even compute focused like Tahiti is. All of the Fermi cards are decent for compute. The GTX 680 is the top Kepler gaming card out right now and we don't know for sure if that will change (685, 680 TI, etc, is all possible, but we don't know for sure). So no, alpha wasn't wrong there. The Pitcairn and Cape Verde didn't sacrifice nearly as much compute performance to get comparable gaming performance per watt and per mm2 of die to Kepler.
The 7970 and other cards are for gamers just as much as they are for professionals and the same is true for the Fermi cards such as the 480 and 580. Reading the review or not, you should know that within the tech industry, nothing is for granted until it's out and even then, it might not be. For example, we don't know if there even will be a GK100 cards besides Teslas or Quadros.
Also, here's Nvidia's take on re-badges:
In the beginning there was the GeForce 8800 GT, and we were happy.
Then, we then got a faster version: the 8800 GTS 512MB. It was more expensive, but we were still happy.
And then it got complicated.
The original 8800 GT, well, it became the 9800 GT. Then they overclocked the 8800 GTS and it turned into the 9800 GTX. Now this made sense, but only if you ignored the whole this was an 8800 GT to begin with thing.
The trip gets a little more trippy when you look at what happened on the eve of the Radeon HD 4850 launch. NVIDIA introduced a slightly faster version of the 9800 GTX called the 9800 GTX+. Note that this was the smallest name change in the timeline up to this point, but it was the biggest design change; this mild overclock was enabled by a die shrink to 55nm.
All of that brings us to today where NVIDIA is taking the 9800 GTX+ and calling it a GeForce GTS 250.
The only changes here were increasing clock frequencies very slightly and a die shrink of the same GPU later on. Re-badges at it's finest. That 8800 GT really got around, didn't it? Like alpha said, both companies do this.