Quote Originally Posted by FischOderAal View Post
I don't understand how people can be disappointed about GCN. It's significantly faster than HD 6970 while consuming noticeably less power. For me, this is a good product. Yes, for someone who owns a GTX 580 this is no card to look forward to. But for people who buy bang for buck and keep energy consumption in mind, will have a great product on their hands. This is what I am and I will surely build a new rig with one of these cards.

Considering some people spilled doom on this card even before this was launched ("AMD will never have stable drivers at release"), I think it went better than expected.

Now I will wait and see what NVIDIA will do. Stick to the US-Credo: the bigger the better?
This is a somewhat dangerous pricing precedent. Say if Nvidia gk 104 comes out and it performs similarly to 7970 and as a result, instead of trying to undercut the 7970, they charge the same price. What happens to the pricing of gk112 when it comes out? Will it be 699 then? The last time this was happening was during NV/ATI price fixing days. I remember ATI's most expensive product ever was the 850 xt platinum edition. This card came out at a MSRP of 549 dollars. This was during the price fixing era. This chip is not a monolith and from rumors, yields are better at 28nm, then they ever were at 40nm. This card is priced as a monolith but it is clearly not one. I find the 500 dollar price tag, is a good number for the most expensive chips to start at. However the pricing t this level is in my opinions should be reserved for monoliths because if a card happens to be 60% bigger or so, from what I have read on this board and other boards, the yields go exponentially down. The more area, the greater chance for errors, and it goes up unproportionally.

Do people want to go back to the 700 dollar graphics cards. With AMD pricing their cards not particularly improving their price to performance level compared to last generation, we could see a huge increase across the board of all of AMD's products. The rumored price that went along with the $549 7970 was a $449 7950. The 7870 if it's slightly faster than the 6970, could easily take between the 350-400 dollar price point. With the reduction in GCN cores and a likely drop in frequency, we re looking at a 7950 that could be around 20 percent slower than the 7970 and a 7870 card slightly faster than a 6970 would fit the 350-400 price point considering the high end pricing from AMD. For a chip that is in the mid 200's in nm2, this is simply too expensive.

The non aggressive pricing on AMD helps Nvidia out big time. Because they barely have to drop the price of their cards to be competitive. It allows Nvidia to raise the price of their cards in the future as well. Without AMD taking the value stance overall, I can see the price fixing era part 2 occurring again.