Are nVidia's products attractive to informed buyers?

[SirPauly]

Imho.

The price/performance from 28mn felt more-so evolutionary and incremental considering the node and arch are substantial and significant.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Imho.

The price/performance from 28mn felt more-so evolutionary and incremental considering the node and arch are substantial and significant.

AMD had to make a stink in the Pro market, I still think they took a hit for that. They were also a bit too hesitant with their clock speeds, they could have gone to at least 1100Mhz or more for a 250w TDP card. If that happened GK104 would have never made it in as a 680.

Nvidia got a great gain on their mid-range, dropping hot clocks and increasing TDP for that lineup gave them a nice bump over past generations mid vs high end by comparison. However the total lack of a actual high end product for the first time since, what? When? I can't even remember when something like this has happened... And then rumors of it being a single card "stop gap" at $800+ with no refresh until late 2013... Mind blown.

Obviously just rumors at this point, but I don't think anyone will be surprised if that's exactly what happens.

 

[Silverforce11]

28nm perf/$ is fine, but only for one product: 7950. Got it for $330 near release and OCed to 1.2ghz, didn't look back since.

Funny enough, my old 5850, i got it for $330 at release and OC it to 950mhz and it was still kicking along fine in BF3 MP.

 

[Rvenger]

What bothers me the most is that Nvidia doesn't seem to listen to their customers and they seem to just do what they want to do.

Example: Locking voltage on all cards, pricing, no high end (GK110) I mean c'mon, its a little late to be releasing gk110 at this point, especially at $800 +

Where are all the physx titles as well? Not too many in the making imo.


Don't get me wrong, I really do like the performance of my GTX 660, but if it wasn't for my chase points taking the price down to $174, I wouldn't have purchased it at $225.

 

[ICDP]

Step back to the 1000 foot view and the performance difference between cards is actually pretty small. On the grand scheme of things buying the latest generation makes much more difference than between the two manufacturers. The competition is very close between the cards. NVidia is also more expensive, but its also pretty close. We aren't talking about one company being twice the price of the other, its within 25% if not a lot less. So why might NVidia think they can charge more?

25% price difference combined with slower performance is not "pretty close". At my res of 2560x1600 the HD 7970 beats the GTX 680 by a significant margin in many games. Last gen the HD 6970 was only ~15% slower on average at and was 30% cheaper, yet many thought the GTX 580 performance delta significant and worth the premium, horrible power consumption was not seen as a factor. Right now the faster card is also the cheaper of the two competing products.

1) People do think their drivers are better. The recent bug list showed a big difference in severity between the two companies so I think its likely true but really depends if you run into the bug and how often.

What bug list would this be? I won't contest a lot of people think Nvidia have better drivers and they are entitled to their opinion but my own experience of HD 79x0 and GTX 6x0 cards has Nvidia in far worse shape. The vsync stutter bug plagued my GTX 680 experience for 3-4 months until Nvidia released a fix. Almost every single game I played stuttered like crazy with vsync enabled. Of course this only proves opinion on this is subjective.

2) 3D.

AMD has 3D as well, maybe not as established but it does exist

5) Less stutter (an established fact at this point).

This is an established opinion, not a fact. See my response above about the horrible Nvidia vsync stutter bug.

On AMDs side though you have:
1) full DX 11 support, something the 600 series is sorely lacking.

I don't think this matters but time will tell. I hope those who purchased Kepler in the hope of future proofing don't get burned.

2) Better compute performance.
3) More VRAM..

You missed out.

4) Better price/performance ratio.
5) Potentially more future proof due to the fact the next gen consoles are using GCN.

NVidia clearly thinks its got an edge and charges a little more for a little less hardware. I don't think its the right call on NVidia's part, I think they should be in and around the price of where they perform, but clearly they think they have the better product overall. The relative market shares seem to agree that the market overall is still mostly theirs. They don't need to change the pricing, especially on the super high end cards that less than 1% of people buy at this point..

I agree with this most of this. I would add the caveat that the price/perf does not only affect the 1% high end. AMD has better price/perf right across the range from mid to high end. I would also add that market share does not dictate what product is better, only what one sold the most.

Having had 7970's and 680's I agree with NVidia, their cards are better. They stutter less, they need less driver tweaks to work and the triple monitor support is dramatically better than with AMD, it works in a lot more games. But there is no doubt in my mind that AMDs cards produce better FPS, they simply don't do so smoothly. Once AMD fixes the problem then maybe finally AMD will have realised the potential of their cards, but right now I consider the only people who should buy AMD are those who genuinely don't perceive microstutter.

This is all totally subjective, you base most (not all) of this on your 7970 CF experience. I have an almost polar opposite opinion based on my experience with the vsync stutter bug. For months I had to endure either tearing or stutter

I don't know what my next card will be, but I know it'll be chosen looking at a lot of factors including price/performance but not exclusively. Price/performance in my mind is about quality motion not FPS and its that I will be looking for in future products, I don't ever want to be in the situation I was in with the 7970's at the beginning of last year, they are the worst GPU purchase I ever made.

I feel your pain on the multi GPU problems. I won't go multi GPU again from either camp, I just had far too many issues.

 

[SirPauly]

However the total lack of a actual high end product for the first time since, what? When? I can't even remember when something like this has happened..

The G-92 generation, where there were smaller dies and bus.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

The G-92 generation, where there were smaller dies and bus.

Wasn't 200 series released around the same time?

 

[JimKiler]

If GK110 comes out at $800+ I'll do exactly that, mid-range for $500, high end for $800+ = Shut up and take my money, AMD.

$800!!! Shut the front door. I only paid > $200 once for a Geforce Ti 4400 because i got at least $100 off. My last card a 7770 is $97 and I have kids so I am fortunate enough to be playing COD MW2 and Black Ops 1 thus not necessitating anything faster for the time being.

 

[SirPauly]

Wasn't 200 series released around the same time?

Depends on sku; a few months later after the 9800GTX!