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greenmedic88 on 19 February 2010
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Soleron said:
drkohler said:
...

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.

That article is really good, I'd recommend it to anyone. It's the story of RV870's creation straight from the engineers who designed it. I'd also recommend the article written for RV770.

The 5850 and 5870 are priced a little high compared with the previous generation. But that is to be expected given the lack of competition and the fact demand still exceeds supply (Proof: look at the 5970's stock situation). They're still rationing Cypress chips, so they can charge what the market will bear.

Compared to 2007 and earlier though, these prices are fantastic. Remember when top-of-the-line was $800 with the 8800 Ultra? Or how nothing under $250 was a decent gaming card with X1x00 and 7x00 cards?

Can't fairly compare this to the pre 2007 VGA graphics situation since cards like the 8800GT and the HD4850 basically let the performance genie out of the bottle at prices any PC gamer who really cared about high performance graphics could afford. The only way you can roll back pricing trends on premium cards is if/when you have a monopoly.

Currently, PC gamers are paying a pretty big premium for that extra 10% performance in the HD5870 for single GPU performance. Even the 5850 doesn't get the immediate nod as the best $290 VGA solution based on raw performance alone.

But there's no arguing with the struggle to keep stock relative to output on the 5850 and 5870. Micro Center doesn't even bother stocking them on shelves when they even have them. They keep them in the stock room or behind the counter. Considering this is 5 months after release, that's a bit unusual. It's for reasons like this that I don't think ATI is "gouging" consumers with these cards as they could clearly sell a lot more of them if they could just keep vendors stocked. Given the higher margins on top tier VGA cards relative to the volume consumer cards (all readily available), there's no reason why they wouldn't if they could.