Quote Originally Posted by highoctane View Post
At the end of the day you pay for the performance, whats under the heat spreader or how that performance is achieved is irrelevant to most.
People may feel that die size is irrelevant, but these things dictate the competitive landscape and the prices are dependant on that. While a GTX 460 is a superb card for the consumer, Nvidia probably wasn't too happy selling it for such a low price. It's their margins that drive the development further and so it is in our best interest in the long term that AMD and Nvidia have similar BoM for the same category of products. Of course we can't know what deals Nvidia or AMD have with TSMC or what are the total costs involved, but die size is probably the single biggest factor when considering the price of a GPU.