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After many months of talking up its latest architecture, Nvidia reclaimed the single-GPU performance crown with its GeForce GTX 680, which outpaced the Radeon HD 7970 by about 7% in our tests. Kepler's arrival forced AMD to slash prices across its Southern Islands lineup, including a $70 drop on the HD 7970, putting it at $479 or about 4% cheaper than the GTX 680's MSRP of $499.
The HD 7950 also took a $60 cut to $399, making it one of the most tempting 7000 series cards because it has no equal -- or had no equal, we should say. Continuing Kepler's rollout, Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 670, which is priced against the HD 7950 at $399. Despite being $100 cheaper than the GTX 680, the GTX 670 doesn't appear to be much slower on paper, and that could spell disaster for AMD.
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@Steve
Ha. probably depends on how long Nvidia have been stockpiling salvage parts, if AMD are going with price reduction v2.0, and how quickly stock gets depleted against Nvidia's increased wafer allocation.
Judging by reviews around the place- yours included- I'd say that anyone who had the 680/690 on a wish list/stock notification, or were fence sitting because of pricing, will probably find the 670 a viable reason to jump onboard. Easy to see why Nvidia didn't launch at the same time as the 680...the 670 makes a much more compelling purchase....not to mention making the 690, 680, 7970 and 7950 redundant at their present price points. Will be interesting to see how the 660 stacks up- though I'm guessing that doesn't make an entrance until Nvidia has exhausted their GF114 inventory
I hope the January-March buyers of 7970's at $US550 got their moneys worth. For my money I'm picking the "GHz Edition" takes the $460-480 bracket presently occupied by the current 925M core version which will then move down to $399 to combat the 670. A 30% pricecut in six weeks.
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"A 30% pricecut in six weeks."
It's worse than that. After market 670 OCs are delivering > HD7970 level of performance for $400-420. Reference 7970 is worthless for overclocking (unless you water cool it or play with headphones) since its fan sounds like a jet engine. I remember when 7970s first launched, the after market versions were going for at least $580. So a $400 GTX670 delivers similar performance today --> That's a $180 loss of value. Early adopters know this though, I hope.
The worst was HD7870/7950. Those cards going for $330-400 are just laughable now. HD7870 should be $299 at most and 7950 at $349. AMD got owned this generation by a mid-range Kepler chip. They had price/performance, performance/watt in the bank last 3 generations and lost every key metric outside of compute performance. They engineers should go back to the drawing board for HD8000 series and deliver the goods.
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[AMD] had price/performance, performance/watt in the bank last 3 generations and lost every key metric outside of compute performance. They engineers should go back to the drawing board for HD8000 series and deliver the goods.
Turned out to be a false economy. Nvidia cut their teeth on adding compute with the G80 over four years ago at the expense of those metrics. AMD concentrated on gaming performance only since they had very little pro market presence and little inclination to expand it. AMD are simply playing catch up adding compute now. It's probably easer to slim down/strip out compute functionality to a design than to add it.
The HD 8000 series is already laid down and likely well advanced. It usually takes 2-3 years of planning and design before the cards actually see the light of day, so AMD were largely committed to GCN and the specification parameters for the 8000 even before the 7000 were out of the oven.
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DanUK said:
What a great card!
AMD must really be starting to feel the pain.
If I didn't already have a 580 I'd jump right on this!
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What a great card! AMD must really be starting to feel the pain.
Enthusiast graphics card sales are more of a marketing coup and a way to keep the brand front-and-centre in the tech arena. AMD's pain is self inflicted in graphics - the high margin pro/workstation/hpc markets (which GTX 680/670 doesn't compete in) are still an Nvidia stronghold with Fermi based cards (and earlier) due to offering a complete hardware+driver+software ecosystem.
AMD still lead Nvidia in foundry process knowledge and time to market, and just as tellingly, the high volume low end of the market.
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StaffSteve said:
Yeah it happened
[link]
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Must be time to roll out the GTX 660 then!....Though the GK 110 looks tasty (preliminary numbers from the published die shot : 2880 shader/cuda cores, 180 TMU's, 48 ROP's, 384-bit memory bus, 2 TFlop double precision -FP64)
A big iron part obviously (the K20), but I'm sure there will be a few enthusiasts ready to throw their cash at a gaming version
...pity these aren't consumer grade- quad SLI on a stick
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Thanks for the review, it pushed me over the edge. Gonna order one right now!
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