Nvidia's GTX480/Fermi is broken

[drkohler]

WilliamWatts said:

greenmedic88 said:
I'd rather not have to basically pay a $100 premium for a 5850 or 5870 because Nvidia doesn't have anything comparable at the same price.

If they did, I'm sure most would agree that a 5850 would probably be priced about $199 and the 5870 about $299 (the initial prices for the 4850 and 4870 respectively). And that doesn't even include the additional premiums both cards command due to short supplies relative to demand. If Nvidia had comparable cards, there wouldn't be shortages on ATI cards and we'd be seeing rebates rather than price hikes from retailers.

It's a lose-lose situation, even if you are an ATI "fan."

The bottleneck here isn't ATI though. Im sure if TSMC's 40nm production was ramped better with better yields they would have returned the chips to their launch prices by now. At present they probably are on a knife edge and any reduction in price would likely lead to shortages again. Once Nvidia starts to ramp up their competitor its not going to help the supply situation in the short term and infact it'll probably make it worse.

Here is a good article about the situation as it is now. It is about ATI's RV870 chip but reading through the article (and occasionally between the lines) one can figure out the (serious) problems NVidia is currently facing: 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3740

On the other hand, I find it rather strange that people think an entire fermi/RV870 based graphics card (chips at least as complex as the best processors available) should be available for a measly $199-ä299.