Quote Originally Posted by Stevethegreat View Post
Just to clear things out:
Since this is not the high end chip (being a GK104 part) of nVidia's new family of cards why the hell do they name it (GTX 680) and price it (>$500) as such?
As we have no verified information on the GK104, or GK110, do you think we can assume the GK104 was not intended to be the high end part all along? What if GK110 is a dual GPU version? What if it never existed, or was a design that got scrapped?
Based on the supposed benches we've seen, the rumored 680 looks to be outperforming the 7970 by about the same margin as the 580 > 6970, the 480>5870. Seems in line with the last two launches?

Quote Originally Posted by Stevethegreat View Post
And since they do so what does that say about the upcoming supposed flagship (GK110)? Will it ever see the light of day or nVidia seeing that she has no reason to release it (since AMD doesn't give much of a competition) will simply let it be on papers alone?
Hard to say without knowing what it is/was, or if it existed ever. My thought is that when I go to buy video cards, I look at what's for sale and evaluate, not what companies are rumored to have been working on.

Quote Originally Posted by Stevethegreat View Post
When "politics" are so *strongly* involved with hardware development you know you're not in a good situation...
What do you mean by this? I'm guessing you're substituting "politics" for "business" based on the context.
If so, you will never be in a "good situation" as you put it. Here's why:

Let's say next time around NVIDIA launches Maxwell first and ATi finds themselves in the position they have three parts they can launch that week, one that beats it by 20%, one by 50%, and one by 100%.

If you launch the 100% faster card you a. make the amount of time you have to work on it's successor as short as possible (bad) b. raise expectations for it's successor (bad) c. get one launch at top tier price instead of possibly three (bad).

Your problem is your expectations are from a consumer perspective, not a business perspective. You want as much as possible as fast as possible for as little as possible. Companies only want to maximize profiit because that's what keeps the lights on and the engineers working.

I think I can almost guarantee you that every product that launches there were alternate designs that were scrapped or put on hold because they were either to expensive to bring to market, couldn't be delivered in a timely fashion, or just didn't need to be brought to market based on reason above.

One reaction might be "Oh man, what about the parts that might have been?!". Another might be, "Let's look at what we have and evaluate merits".