Average price drop of gpu's in a month and a year?

[Dolphindream]

Heres a topic for discussion, i got interested about it, how fast graphic card prices drop in a year and month?

What do you think guys? Like... 40% in a year? Little less than 5% in a month or something??
For example, if someone would like to buy 5870 and would wait for lets say, 3 months, then how much pricecut there would be?

 

[Borealis7]

prices don't necessarily drop within a single year. only minor fluctuations between the various brands. it depends on many factors, such as the current position in the "performance wars" between nVidia and ATI and also product availability, MSRP, price cuts, cost to manufacture and so on.

for instance, ATI's 5xxx series has been out for 9 months and price hasn't dropped, in fact, it has gone up in MSRP and de-facto at e-tailers.

price-cuts are a product of market situations. if a product can be reduced in price to dominate a lower price segment while maintaining profitability then one might consider a price-cut.

 

[Sylvanas]

+1 above, couldn't have said it better.

Don't go round expecting price-cuts by a certain amount, the factors that determine this are in flux and we may not know what's around the corner.

 

[railven]

prices don't necessarily drop within a single year. only minor fluctuations between the various brands. it depends on many factors, such as the current position in the "performance wars" between nVidia and ATI and also product availability, MSRP, price cuts, cost to manufacture and so on.

for instance, ATI's 5xxx series has been out for 9 months and price hasn't dropped, in fact, it has gone up in MSRP and de-facto at e-tailers.

price-cuts are a product of market situations. if a product can be reduced in price to dominate a lower price segment while maintaining profitability then one might consider a price-cut.

I don't know...

Isn't it usually within 12-15 months that refreshes or next generation come out?

I think the ATI 5xxx series is the first series I remember not following the usual trend. And there are a lot of factors as to why.

But I'd say within the time frame of 12-15 months you'd see a price drop in GPU hardware as new versions come out and even better new hardware generations.

 

[A_Dying_Wren]

All depends on the competition. I'm fairly certain if Fermi was on track we'd be seeing much cheaper prices today. If I'm not mistaken ATI 4xxx series hammered Nvidia prices on their GT200 architecture with its low pricing.

Although, i think we may see a trend coming up where tech updates get slower and prices don't drop so fast. Its becoming increasingly expensive and yields are dropping as we migrate to smaller and smaller transistors. While I don't doubt we'll keep going for generations yet, each new fab at smaller transistor sizes will cost more and more.

 

[veri745]

You may be able to figure out a historical average, but I would guess the variance would be way too high to make any meaningful predictions on new/current products. Too many other factors affect price, as Borealis said.

 

[RaistlinZ]

I'm 99% sure that AMD will release a refresh of the 58xx series that will be priced slightly higher than current 58xx prices. Of course, they will also have slightly better performance to match up with the GTX 470 and 480.

AMD has already seen that people are willing to pay $50-100 over MSRP for these cards, so why lower the price? The only real value out there seems to be 2x5770 CrossFire.

 

[Seero]

The solo reason why price have not drop is due to supply. Due to the problem of TMSC, video cards don't hit the market with the quantity that was expected. It start last sept., where 5870 was out, but people can't get it. There was a lot of back orders and the card simply not on stores. It was until Jan, 2010 when we finally see some 5870 around. The same thing happened to Fermi, as 480 are still very rare. As of now, there are still people who wanted to upgrade their video cards, either wait for Fermi to hit the stores, or Evergreen to drop in price. Because of these demands, price stays.

Unfortunately, 480 is not as attractive as it should be, allowing 5870 to have a reason for its price, and since Nvidia won't release a faster card anytime soon, there won't be a price change for those cards. However, you may expect a small price change on 5850 and below, as Fermi is about to release Fermi 2 for the mainstream market at June[Rumor 460]. It isn't going to be big, about 30 bucks give or take next month.

If things on the Nvidia side goes well, there may be a 485 sooner than expected. That will cut the price on both 480 and 5870 by a degree. That is my guess.

 

[happy medium]

It seems ATI and Nvidia created the perfect performance /price line up.
Every card has its own performance slot and correct pricepoint.
It sucks for us but great for both companies.

There will be no price war untill one of them drops the price on any of these cards.
Why should they, people are buying them at these prices right?