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What price can the fastest card in the market command? It's a good question and one that AMD and nVidia have both been seeking to answer recently. KitGuru noticed a price move by accident. Here's what we found and how we found it.
The fight for the title of the world's fastest graphic card is a hard-fought affair, with both nVidia and AMD claiming first blood with the launch of the GTX590 and Radeon HD 6990 respectively.
On this occasion, the independent labs gave the win to AMD – but some margin – and that seems to have spurred nVidia on to considering a GTX595 in the near future. Which is a good thing, right?
So, back with the current leader, the Radeon HD 6990 – how much should it be?
When the card was tested every-which-way in the KitGuru Labs, back at the start of March – the street price was set to be a smidgeon under £550. Now THAT's what KitGuru calls a long of wonga.
Roll the clock forward less than 3 months and you can find the same card for less than £499 on a number of sites – including larger online retailers like Aria – where it's just £497 at the time of writing.
The KitGuru back office staff were looking at adverts which link into Google's shopping facility – and that's where the drop was noticed first.
nVidia's slower GTX590 is also available from Aria – but they want a whopping £72 more.
There are two possibilities as to why the AMD cards offer so much better value right now. One is that AMD wants to go even more aggressively after market share – so the price drop is intended to put additional pressure on nVidia. The second is that nVidia believes its customer base is strong and will not consider a move to Radeon. On that basis, you can ignore a price difference of more than £70 ($110), because you know that your customers are not going anywhere.
The latest research from Jen Hsun Huang's favourite industry analyst, Jon Peddie, indicates that at the start of 2011 AMD sales have picked up almost 17% year on year, while nVidia has dropped almost 9%.
KitGuru says: What these research numbers do not show is how well nVidia is doing in the handheld market. If Quadro did not represent such a huge amount of pure profit for nVidia, then the company might well turn away from the development of expensive, high-end processors and focus instead on ‘being everywhere'. For now, it has to carry on developing high-end solutions and getting as much money as it can for them.
Comments below or in the KitGuru forum.
Very nice indeed. nvidia pricing is way out, but it was even before this drop
I hear a lot of people are excited for the “revised” GTX 590 that Nvidia is planning to announce, but they also want a replacement process.
Basically they want to give back their old (flawed) GTX 590s and get the new, modified ones. Last time, Nvidia did no such thing (Apple MacBook Pro Nvidia Chips had issues, there was no Nvidia Replacement Program put into effect). Maybe they’ve learned from that mistake and will indeed offer a replacement program this time.
If they do, they’ll most likely get to keep a large portion of their customers in the future. If they don’t, then the customers who are having issues with their GTX 590s will most likely never return, or stick to SLing Cards in the future, if they’re that loyal fans.
I’d rather Nvidia stays in the GPU Market personally however. If a company has competition, (actual, viable competition) then its pushed to do better. AMD could really improve on the stock coolers it ships out, and people have qualms about the Drivers, although those are being improved. If they didn’t have Nvidia to push them to constantly get better and better, they’d start slacking and get lazy.
On the other hand, both companies are slowly starting to lose some profit due to Intel’s Onboard Graphics. Ivy Bridge will introduce Onboard Graphics Chips with DX11, probably with about the same power as Mid-end Radeon HD 6xxx/GTX 5xx Series Cards. Those who used to buy low-end Radeon HD 5xxx Series or GTX 4xx Series are probably fine with their Integrated Graphics, so less profit for AMD/Nvidia. Its a good time to drop out. Less low-end GPUs will be necessary in the future, meaning less GPUs per-Series to be made, meaning less profits overall.
However, Nvidia has announced plans to move on from Fermi in the GTX 6xx Series, its a good opportunity to start over, create some ridiculously excellent Cards and get back in the game. With good prices of course. When you’ve got a Radeon HD 6950 which costs almost half of a GTX 580 and which you can also BIOS Flash to 6970 Speeds, some people will clearly rather go for that, if they have no preference to AMD or Nvidia.
I think Impy hit the nail right on the head. offer their loyal customers a replacement system and hold onto them. Stop denying there were problems because everyone knows there was/is.
Its not a hard thing to do, but it might cost some money. Interesting to see how it develops. they dont have a great past record of looking after their audience.
Alternatively, how about if AMD and Nvidia just merge together with their company logo being a large picture of a man expressing his love for Rude Russy?
or alternatively a large picture of a man f**king a dog?
@Rude: Sorry, but I don’t think we know you well enough to call you a dog 😉