The argument of market dictating prices is sometimes irrelevant if you believe that markets can be inefficient. According to your argument, say if Company A pays a premium for Company B, then the additional premium was justified because the market pricing dictated it. That's an argument with flawed logic written all over it. Market price and value do not have to be correlated.
It may be sometimes inefficient, and is probably inefficient all of the time in reality given the complex nature of what goes into pricing a good, but it is certainly a better determination of value than anything else you or I are going to come up with subjectively. If company A in your example charges a premium, and people pay that premium, then they value that good from company A more than a competing or even identical product from Company B, regardless of whether their value perception comes from something tangible or something that they believe to make it real. See almost all "luxury goods" for example. You could argue that someone who pays a premium for one item over another identical item is not a rational actor and therefore fuels inefficient markets, but that is human nature and has occurred and will occur as long as people exist. And even with that inefficiency, the price of a product as determine by a market is *still* a much better indicator of value than any other metric you are going to find in almost every case.
As far as I am concerned, irregardless of NV offerings, 5850 and 5870 still sell at or above their MSRP of September 2009. To anyone who has been building computers for a long time, this suggests that both are overpriced regardless of what the market pricing is, or the performance NV offers.
Your first assumption is that MSRP is some sort of independently set "thing" that has any meaning at all. Short of selling restrictions that force a set price, the MSRP is Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price, nothing more. It is a companies best guess when they release a product as to what price will allow their good to profit maximize based on price and sales. AMD and its partners made its guess based on all its information at the time. As time went on the market came in and dictated that demand was outstripping supply and that AMD's profit maximizing point was higher than their initial guess at price (i.e. the MSRP). Go look into Newegg's real time pricing mechanism if you want to see it in action, as cards and products are more popular their computers automatically raise the prices so they make more money. That is a market within a market working efficiently.
Also, I have been building PC's for a long time. I also understand that MSRP's are nothing more than guesses by the company at the time of release of their product. As I am sure that you have seen as well, technology, specifically quick innovation technology like GPU's are all over the board all of the time in price and always will be, regardless of what MSRP is set at or otherwise.
If the market participants are willing to buy a 5850 over a similarly performing GTX460 overclocked, or pay a $100 premium over a 5870 which barely outperforms a GTX470, good for AMD! But as far as videocard forums, we are discussing price/performance ratio here. There is no subjectivity in price/performance. GTX460 beats 5850 and GTX470 beats a 5870 in price/performance, regardless if ATI sells 10x as many 5850s as GTX460/470s.
*You* may be discussing price/performance strictly, but it is a mistake to assume that is all that anyone in these forums cares about. Wreckage makes a good point earlier when he says things like CUDA, PhysX etc add real value in the minds of consumers and people on these forums. We see posts all the time speaking to this exact issue when someone says they want Nvidia because they like PhysX or they want AMD because of Eyefinity or whatever.
As far as their being no subjectivity...I think you will find that to be a loaded statement. Half the forum posts (and nearly 100% of the troll posts) get into details about driver revisions, game benchmarks, TWIWMTBP, OC'd cards, etc etc etc...and how they impact any one test outcome. Just go look down the forums and look at all the posts. Anyone that posts a graphics review with numbers nearly always turns into flame fest about what was wrong and right about the review, the games used, the cards used, drivers etc...making it not always clear to many people what the true price/performance of cards are. That is not even considering that most people do not own high end review type machines, so they really have no idea what the price performance would be for them.
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