Well there is a thing called inflation. You cant expect top tier cards to stay at 550$ forever.
a month or 2 after release ,I expect this..
Titan X 799$ vs Fiji Fury card
980ti 599$ vs 390x
980 399$ vs 380x
970 279$ vs 370x
I don't think you've been following the recent rumours.
380/380X are rumoured to be Tonga and Tonga XT (fully unlocked)
R9 390/390X are rumoured to be R9 290/290X with higher clocks and 8GB of GDDR5. That means 390/390X (Hawaii Rev 2) is going to compete with GTX970/980, not GTX980Ti.
What competes with GTX980Ti/Titan X is supposedly Fiji Pro and Fiji XT. At this point we don't know when Fiji Pro will launch and what the names will be. The key takeaway here is almost everyone on this forum is now dismissing any high-end card existing that should slot between a 390X and Fiji Fury. All we have are $399 R9 390X (1050mhz 8GB GDDR5 R9 290X), and $849 Fiji Fury. That makes no sense. There is some missing information here about a 3500 shader Fiji PRO, or the names are being misinterpreted.
This seems more realistic given Fiji's projected price of $850. $650 would be stupid low for an almost flagship product.
No it wouldn't be "stupid low." It would rather mean Fiji Fury and Titan X are "stupidly overpriced" for 99% of PC gamers who have paid attention to 30 years of GPU history.
Well there is a thing called inflation. You cant expect top tier cards to stay at 550$ forever.
The inflation argument doesn't work because it hardly explains that prices increased 50-100%, depending on the segment. NV's gross margins have increased from upper-30% to mid-50% from GTX200-> Maxwell generation. You can look up 5-6 years of NV's annual financial statements to confirm this. Today, NV's gross margin is in the 54-56% range, which is about a 45-50% increase from their Fermi gross margins in 2010.
$499-549 680/980 are successors of a $249 GTX560Ti
$999 Titan X is a spiritual successor of $550 GTX580 3GB because it's essentially only a gaming videocard with double the VRAM of the standard model.
A $649 price for 980Ti just sounds good in comparison of the rumoured $850 Radeon Fury and $1K Titan X. How much did a cut-down Fermi cost compared to the top card? $349 is what the GTX570 cost.
Now imagine GTX580 3GB = Titan X and GTX570 = 980Ti, what do we get?
580 3GB vs. 570
512 vs. 480 shaders (+6.7% more)
64 vs. 60 TMUs (+6.7% more)
3GB vs. 1.28GB (+234% more) (although they did later have
2.56GB version of the GTX570)
48 ROPs vs. 40 ROPs (+20% more)
Titan X vs. 980Ti
3072 vs. 2816 shaders (+9.1% more)
192 vs. 176 TMUs (+9.1% more)
12GB vs. 6GB (+100% more)
96 ROPs vs. 96 ROPs (tied)
Nvidia cut down the 980Ti more on the shader and texture side but left the ROP side untouched. The GTX570 is more cut down on the ROP/memory side.
980Ti's performance will be closer to the Titan X than 570's was to the GTX580 but is that worth the price increase from $349 to $649? Unlike GTX570 that provided the option of 2.56GB of VRAM vs. GTX580 3GB, 980Ti seems to come in only 6GB and nothing in between 6GB and 12GB, which means for productivity it's even more neutered than 570 was vs. 580 if we use the VRAM as the biggest selling point of the Titan X's premium over the 980Ti today.
It's not wonder NV's gross margins have skyrocketed because they conditioned gamers now that $500-550 for mid-range and $700-1000 for flagships are reasonable prices and that historical prices of GPUs do not count. I have a feeling a lot of younger gamers entering the PC gaming industry just don't know since they are too young so they think $550 for a mid-range 980 and $1K for flagship gaming card - Titan X - is somehow the historical norm.
It is what it is and we as gamers either have to pay the higher prices or adopt our upgrading/timing strategy. Because of such inflated prices of flagship cards today, we are probably going to see more of these situations where a $350-400 next gen mid-range ~ $700-1000 last gen flagship, similar to a $330 GTX970 vs. $699 780Ti/ $1K OG Titan.