Kepler Nvidia GeForce GTX 780

[kgk]

I would like to see some price shifting as well but I'm not so sure we will with the first keplers hitting the market, the top performing card will always command a premium even if its only marginally faster. Unless the card nvidia launches is going to be a direct competitor performance wise it will hit at a different market and price segment without affecting the price of high end cards.

However if Nvidia manages to perform on par with the 7970 then there's a good chance we'll see some price adjustments from AMD.

I have no particular bias either on hardware, it all boils down to what I need for what I'm willing to spend when I'm ready to buy.

All my htpc's have AMD cards while my gaming and work systems I ended up with Nvidia hardware, that's just the way the cards fell.

As with all hardware, there's always something better around the corner, when I'm ready to buy I'm generally ready to buy without putting too much emphasis on whats around the corner, there's always something. If something that much better comes out it's fairly easy to sell off old hardware on ebay or friends.

That's not necessarily always the case. Even if a competing card is slightly lower performing, if it has a drastically better price/performance ratio the top end hardware could still see a decrease in price so that it doesn't price itself out of the market. Purchasing "what's available when it's available" is a perfectly reasonable justification for any hardware purchase though, particularly if something is badly outdated or broken. If you need a component at that very moment, you need the component. Simple as.

However if you can afford yourself the extra wiggle room to adopt a current "gen" once both manufacturers have a product on the market and prices normalize, you provide yourself with an advantage. It's true (to an extent) that there's "always something better around the corner", but timing your adoption cycles properly allows you to avoid significant price gouging by the first company to release for a current "gen" or fab process. If someone is running an AMD 5870 or 6970 series card, or an NVIDIA 480/580 series card, paying $600+ for a 7970 smacks of impatience. There isn't some bombshell gaming title being released in the next few months that will melt any of those older cards, necessitating the immediate adoption of the first 28nm GPU to cross the finish line.

In my personal opinion I think the 7970 is overpriced for what you get. You can get a GTX580 3GB card for $100+ less, moderately overclock it and wind up with roughly identical performance at high resolution/detail settings. So if it's a simple price/performance issue there are still better options than a 7970.

There are always early adopters of products/cycles. I'm just trying to make the case that I think it's prudent for those where a GPU upgrade is not an immediate issue to wait a month or two for a Kepler release and then look at the 28nm GPU market once the prices start to normalize.