I'm not bitching about the prices of NV, I'm bitching about the prices of video cards in general. How can you say it's not AMD's fault? This year, they were the first on the market with a new architecture and they induced the price increase relative to last generation. They went from $369 MSRP to $549 MSRP. Apples to apples keeping all things fair, we are looking at a $700 GTX 680.
Are you okay with that?
If you feel the 7970 is priced correctly, then I guess you also don't have a problem with a $700 GTX 680?
The 7970 is the top card and commanded a premium. Were you complaining when the 580 was launched? So what if the MSRP went up from their last gen...the 6970 came out when there was more competition and so they couldn't price it higher. This time there is no competition so they have priced it accordingly.
What makes you think nV will launch at $700? They will price it according to what they think the market will bear and their own supply. And if AMD no longer have the top card they will reduce prices making it even less likely that nV would launch at a super high price. You're saying it as if prices will never go down. I really hope you and others complaining about the price of the mid-high and high end 7 series cards are doing the same if nV launches their cards and price it relative to the 7 series cards. If they DO price it lower, kudos to them and they will reap the benefits of more sales and we will see better prices from both sides. Judging by nV's history, I'm not so sure it will be priced like the 4870 was relative to the GTX280.
Don't forget nV set the benchmark for ultra-high pricetags with the $830 8800Ultra.
"That's right, this new high end graphics card will be priced $230 higher than the current performance leader. With such a big leap in price, we had hoped to see a proportional leap in performance. Unfortunately, for the 38% increase in price, we only get a ~10% increase in core and shader clock speeds, and a 20% increase in memory clock. "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2222
And if anyone is thinking AMD did $1000 5970 4GBs, those were not officially by AMD, they were vendor made limited run cards, like the 2Win(?) cards from eVGA.
I don't get paid or get free stuff to post about this stuff so it does me no good to sit here and argue with those that do.
You must know something to make this claim. Care to share?