Quote Originally Posted by Vipeax View Post
Surely the HD4850 & HD4870 didn't follow up on that rule, heck even nVidia did better than that (8800GT for example, which this could have been). Anyway, let's take the HD5870 as an example, it could have costed 500 euros (I mean, the HD7870 apparently can). Then as a follow-up the GTX480 could have been 650 euros (it's better so why not)? Then the GTX580 and HD6970 could have been 775 and 900, putting the current cards above 1000.
When the 4xxx series launched Nvidia had to price their big die and bus high end way down relative to AMD/ATI's offerings, so with the gtx280 & 285 we got high end gpu for midrange price. The gpu, die size, node, memory, bus, etc didn't alone decide the pricing but the performance relative to the competition and their pricing was the determining factor.

Performance and pricing is going to be relative to the competition, if AMD launched 7970 at $300 well then we would have ~$300 Nvidia cards of comparable level of performance.

We pay XXXX dollars for a product that will deliver XXXX performance.

In the case of the 680 we are paying for a high end level of performance based on what AMD has already released and set the bar for pricing at for this level of performance, doesn't matter what the 680 specs are.