Quote Originally Posted by tajoh111 View Post
I think it depends. Atleast for the consumer. If nvidia and AMD performance is very similar to each other, price cuts are not a necessity. Since they perform similarly, they can be priced close to each other. Since AMD pricing is at an all time high for the company, this leaves room for very high pricing, particularly for the ultra high end. This is strictly hypothetical but if gk104 outperforms 7970 by 20% and is priced around $500 AMD would be forced to drop the price of 79xx series 100 dollars or more. The lower Nvidia pricing, the more AMD has to drop the prices of their cards. If Nvidia prices high enough of course, AMD won't have to drop prices.
That's short-term thinking though. If that trend were to continue and AMD got out of the high end segment, in the long run it would be bad for consumers because we'd be stuck with high-priced cards with mediocre improvements each generation.

Quote Originally Posted by dartaz View Post
The difference between GTX 580 1.5GB and 3GB is negligible even at extreme high resolution with 4x/8x AA
http://www.hardware.fr/focus/50/test...-surround.html

In other words, even 1.5GB is more enough enough for your 30 inch display
For most games that might be true but some of the newer games can easily use more than 1.5GB. I saw 2.2-2.4GB of vram usage playing Skyrim with the HD texture pack and 8xAA.