Btw, the actual price to the consumer varies over time, too. Example: the high efficiency of the GTX 750 Ti means that it saves money in the long run vs similar AMD cards, especially for multi-monitor users. Those watts add up over the years; in my case, adding up the wattage (idle multimonitor, gaming, etc. times the marginal cost per kilowatt hour), the differential is somewhere around $5 to $10 savings each year compared to the AMD Radeon 260X. The 260X is also slower than the GTX 750 Ti in the first place. So the clear choice for me was to get the GTX 750 Ti since it was faster and would ultimately cost the same as the 260X after a couple of years. And would be cheaper, beyond that timeframe.
That comparison hardly applies. From the first week GTX750Ti was out, one could get way faster cards than R9 260X -- 7850/7870/R9 270/270X. This applies even today:
$130 R9 270X is
44% faster than a 750Ti.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131532&cm_re=r9_270X-_-14-131-532-_-Product
While your point about energy savings stands, your comparison of a 750Ti to a 260X is way off. I can't even count the number of times in the least 9 months I've posted a deal on a $100-130 R9 270/270X since GTX750Ti launched.
I find it funny that he used 295X2 as an example, it is a GPU and not a freesync monitor to directly compare.
Not to mention he used 295X2 instead of the Titan Z lol!
Bingo. His comparison is flawed. As GPUs get older, and faster ones come out, there are price drops. There isn't really a monitor available for sale that has the features of the ROG Swift which is why it's in high demand. Should there be 1-2 monitors that are way cheaper with similar performance or better quality, the ROG Swift will fall out of favour. Since the state of progress in the monitor industry is slower than GPUs, it's only natural that the ROG Swift would have retained its value for longer.
This article only helps to highlight how much NV hates to lower prices without competition. That's why we need a strong AMD to force NV to drop prices ($650 280 -> $500 in 1 month, $650 780 --> $500 once R9 290 series launched). Without AMD, NV will just keep prices high for even longer.
As a
consumer I actually find NV's pricing strategy a lot more flawed than AMD's. As the GPU's life-cycle runs, its price should gradually decline over time until a new series/competitor's product replaces it. This is because costs to manufacture an XXXmm2 die on the same node fall over time because each node has its own life-cycle and its own associated manufacturing costs that get passed on to NV/AMD. In turn, AMD cards tend to fall quicker over time which is a more fair reflection of what happens to pricing of wafers and increased yields at GloFo and TSMC. Unlike AMD that passes on theses costs to the consumers, NV instead converts these savings into their higher gross margins over the life-cycle of the node/GPU generation. That's why we hardly see price drops on cards like 680/780Ti/980 over their useful life.
Since the consumers don't mind paying NV the same price for a GPU on day 1 as 6-9 months from launch, it seems they don't look into any of this or the actual timing of GPU generations. Win for NV. However, those consumers who understand nodes, product life-cycles and follow the GPU market closely would be unlikely to pay $550 for a 980 today since it's already a 6 months old product, which means it's realistic price should probably be closer to $450-475. That's why usually the largest price drops on the NV side happen when AMD releases something way better in price/performance or NV releases a new architecture (Fermi -> Kepler -> Maxwell) where due to performance improvements of a new architecture/node, we get a situation of a $300 660Ti matching a 580 or a $330 970 coming close to a $650 780Ti.
Good for NV for having established their strong marketing brand for the average PC gamer but I don't pay premium for marketing fluff/brand name, and I also understand product life-cycles and TSMC/GloFo node manufacturing, which is why to me NV's constant pricing for SKUs for 9-12 months until the next refresh makes no sense as a consumer. It's pretty much a given that unless AMD launches R9 390X series, NV will ride 970/980 at $330/$550 respectively for as long as possible. In theory, even without competition, the manufacturing cost for those cards is lower today which means they should cost less to us as consumers but NV is not passing any of those savings --
100% copy of the Apple strategy, the company JHH admires and wants to copy above all.
Tom must be thinking we don't have the intelligence to understand that pricing is dictated by competitive situation.
Every generation now NV keeps raising prices/offering less features. They first raised 560Ti from $250 to $500 in a 680, then they raised 680's successor's price from $500 to $550 in a 980. Their dual-chip flagship card used to cost $599 in a GTX590 and their last was Titan Z at $3000. With the Titan brand, NV now blatantly removed DP performance but kept the same $999 price. The most unfortunately aspect why NV can keep doing this is because even when AMD beats NV in nearly every metric, consumers hardly switch. Sometimes I don't even think NV directly competes with AMD. As of late, they are living in their own world selling a 780Ti successor for $999 (Titan X), while just in 2010 GTX480/580 were $499.
Let's hope AMD brings it with R9 300 and R9 400 series to keep the competition going!
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