Guys. You are just pulling numbers out of your arses. Show me a scanned document or an official press release and I will believe it. You really expect me to believe rumors on an internet forum about Nvidia's or AMD's manufacturing costs? I can't believe you guys are for real. Even if the indonesian guy is right about the cost of a GTX card (and I have absolutely no reason to believe him), AMD's costs are still a complete mystery. The bottom line is cost speculation is irrelevant. Even MSRPs aren't all that important. What is important is the actual street prices. That is what determines the bang for buck. I am at least basing my GDDR5 costs on what DDR3 vs. DDR2 costs upon release. IIRC DDR3 was 2-4 times more expensive than DDR2. You really think the memory manufacturers are only going to charge a 10% premium over the old tech memory? That's just ridiculous. However none of us have any hard numbers. If someone does then fine. I will believe it. I realize that some of you probably think I am some kind of Nvidia fanboy, but I am not. I have no horse in this race. My next card is almost certainly going to be an HD4870x2. I just think many of you are being unrealistic and over-hyping things in AMDs favor. The assumption is that Nvidia's card costs significantly more to manufacture but that assumption is based on very little. And "significantly more" could mean $120 per card instead of $70 per card. It may only cost an extra $10 - $20 per die, and it seems reasonable to assume that the GDDR3 is going to be significantly cheaper. There is very limiited supply for GDDR5 and demand for it is very high. If it were the same price and widely available don't you think Nvidia would be using it too? As for the GTX280 being so expensive, it is not any more expensive than most of Nvidia's high end releases in the past few years. Actually it's about the same street price as the 8800GTX was selling for and now you can buy those cards for just over $200. So yes. I think these companies make a large profit for their new cards. They are in business to make money. So they charge as much as they think they can. And they need to recoup their R&D costs for a new arch.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if:
1) the memory on both the AMD and Nvidia cards cost more than the GPU.
2) both the HD4870 and the GTX280 cost under $100 to manufacture.
3) recouping the large R&D costs is more relevant to the prices than the actual manufacturing costs.

So which company spends more on R&D may be more relevant to the MSRPs of the high end cards than the actual cost of manufacturing the card itself. This is the point. I don't think anyone posting here really knows why each company prices a particular card a certain way. All we have are guesses and assumptions. I am willing to bet that Nvidia could sell the GTX280 for $189 and still make a profit, but probably not enough to recoup their research costs.