This card is a HORRIBLE value if priced at $549. And the only reason it's being priced like this is because NV has no product to counter it yet. Competition shouldn't be necessary to keep the price down.
1) Individual income levels (i.e., making $60 a day vs. $1,000 a day, etc.)
2) Individual's own internal perception of value (is gaming their primary hobby, do they game 2-3 hours a week or 20-30 hours? or once a month?)
3) Marginal utility derived from a purchase can also be emotional (i.e., not just what you can measure in FPS count). What if buying a $500 videocard makes you feel better than spending $500 on a booth at a club, on a $220 bottle of Dom Perignon, on $2,500 Louis Vuitton purse for your wife, Bruno Magli shoes, etc. I mean we can write a 10,000 page essay here....value is subjective.
Based on these factors, what is expensive to you and I at $500 is reasonable to someone else.
Just asking, because I don't know, but isn't WoW more CPU bound? And has it been optimized for quad+ CPUs? Because I thought the lag in points wasn't bound to effects and such... but lots of moving pieces and the like.
Also, based on the benchmarks, I am seeing a 40-50% increase over GTX580, not the 20-30% being thrown around.
On immature drivers for a totally different architecture, mighty impressive. Even if its 1600p, gtx580's 1.5gb vram is not a bottleneck in all those benches, outside of BF3 with 4xMSAA.
Clear lead to 28nm and performance lead for 2 quarters, AMD failing? You must be dreaming.
So many people are discounting this card for stupid reasons. Even if it's only 20-30% faster than a gtx580 you should all remember that the gtx580 has mature drivers because the fermi architecture has been around for a while now. GCN is brand new, and AMD is showing these numbers on release drivers for a brand new architecture. I can see those performance numbers climbing much higher 6mo-1year from now.
Also, why does everyone thinkg gk104 is coming out in q1-q2? Every rumor I've seen on it says q4, or later.
Since when have cards been priced at a 1:1 price/performance scale? Especially when you're talking about the top performing card? In some ways this is actually a drastic improvement over the 570 and 580, which were nowhere near 1:1 then and aren't now.This isn't what I'm contesting. I'm contesting value against AMD's own products, value of 7970 vs 6970, at 50% more performance = 50% more price. Do you want to know where we would end up like this?
When hasn't the highest performing card NOT been a horrible value? It's been this way for many, many years.This card is a HORRIBLE value if priced at $549.
You've got this completely wrong, it's priced like this precisely because there IS a competing, slower product...which is $500. What is AMD supposed to do with that? If the 580 GTX were down at $400-425 rather than on its "top single-card" inflated throne, THEN the $550 tag would seem a stretch.And the only reason it's being priced like this is because NV has no product to counter it yet.
It's how things have always operated. $549 actually makes sense in the context of currently available products and their current prices. The 580 made less sense but still ended up being a very successful part, because the people buying these cards don't care about value as much as raw performance.All I'm saying is that if something launches at a certain price premium, it will either drop, or we will pay through the nose going forward. Hence this card launched at $549 is bad value for us.
What does this even mean? Substance please.AMD's 2012 strategy......complete and utter failure for high end GPU's.
Apparently it's ok if Nvidia charges 500 Bucks for the fastest single card solution but if Ati does it there's a problem.7970 probably targets the kind of market like the 580 does.
Ati/AMD can charge 500 Bucks and let the market decide....
Post HD 2000 series ATi/AMD had to change their strategy so they wouldn't become irrelevant. They started to work their way up from the mainstream and now have the ability to command a price premium for their top end GPU.I think people are upset because Nvidia builds huge GPUs, whereas AMD has been going for the smaller GPU stratagegy, then take the performance crown with the dual-GPU part. Larger GPUs have lower yields and you produce less of them per wafer. With the exception of the 6970, AMD's pricing of their highest performing GPU has also crept up slowly since the 4870. $300 for the 4870, $400 for the 5870 when Fermi showed up late and now possibly $550 for the 7970. However, I remember a time when the top end GPUs were typically $600, though thankfully now midrange cards are pretty good. At one point, anything that wasn't on the higher end was crap, the Nvidia 8 series being the most recent example.
Post HD 2000 series ATi/AMD had to change their strategy so they wouldn't become irrelevant. They started to work their way up from the mainstream and now have the ability to command a price premium for their top end GPU.
AMD's 2012 strategy......complete and utter failure for high end GPU's.
Not sure how you extrapolated "AMD failing" as a company from this. ?
It's a response to the post directly above mine from Pacman, who seems to be activating his troll mode, thinking AMD is set for fail since these cards so expensive. We've been trying to tell him this is quite the norm (with no success), premium part, premium pricing.
Guys, you are all talking about the 7970 and its price comapred to the 580.... But don't forget that seeing the latest leaks the 7950 AND the 7870 will be faster or equal to the 580 (the fastest of the competition) also... In what price range should they fall? Are we really expecting 580like performance for <200$ as some apparently expect?
At this point AMD can sell the 7870 for the same price as the 6970 with increased performance and lower pwr consumption and already pressure Nvidia to lower their prices of the 560-570-580... Heck even the 7850 seems to be faster according to the leaks than the 570...
It's a response to the post directly above mine from Pacman, who seems to be activating his troll mode, thinking AMD is set for fail since these cards so expensive. We've been trying to tell him this is quite the norm (with no success), premium part, premium pricing.
And not just for GPU's...anything enthusiast/top-of-the-line has an added cost....I don't know anywhere that isn't the case.