I'm lost for words.
On a more serious note you do have wonder how long it will be until Nvidia turns things around in the consumer video card market, it's been years since that have had a financial cash cow top end product. A lot of the 8000 series were defective, it was rumoured that Nvidia struggled to make any kind of money out of the GT200 line especially in the last 12 months of it's life and sales of it's top end 480 have been anaemic an the 470 has seen it's retail price slashed by 27% in the space of a few months just to be competitive. Unless Nvidia need to seriously get with the times as realise they are no longer competing against a company that follows the same doctrine as they are and change their design philosophy as there trying to compete against efficiency with pure muscle and it isn't working.
Yup, many people have been saying this for 2 years, though its not entirely just efficiency they are fighting. Efficiency is fantastic, it lets you produce the same performance in a smaller size, the key thing though is AMD are willing to sacrifice the very very best performance to keep the cards cheap. In business terms, a company selling 5million cards at £200 with a slime profit will do MUCH better than a company selling 100k £400 cards with only a little more profit.
Cheaper cards sell more, more people can afford a cheaper card, and more people will upgrade more often, when they are cheaper.
THe other upside is volume sales increase sales of your other cards at the same time. IF Dell decide because they are £200, instead of £300, to get 2million 5850's instead of 2million 470gtx's(at launch pricing) then thats 2 million sales gained, but because they are already buying so many AMD cards, they'll be more likely to buy AMD midrange, and low end cards, which will grab them another 10 million sales.
Nvidia lose at every pricepoint, and the industry is ruled by pricepoints. I'll buy a card(given value for its performance, ie a 470gtx now, yes, a 480gtx 55% more for 10% more performance, no) but Dell, HP, Apple, etc, etc who buy in the 10million + range a year, do EVERYTHING by price points, everything. They'll get a card because it fits in to a $300 computer, and they'll buy a different card and cpu, mobo, memory because it fits into a $400 computer, and so on and so on.
Thats why AMD has stolen millions of those sales in the last couple years.
Nvidia needs a core on par size and performance wise with AMD because Dell and co account for 99.999% of their profits, us forum enthusiasts, make no difference on their financial results at all.
A 470gtx is a truly great card at near enough £200, its great when cards get EOL'd and we get silly prices, but if Nvidia only sold 470gtx's, they'd be bankrupt in a couple months, if they could only sell cards at a massive loss, or any company could only sell products at a loss, they'd be in trouble.
Until now AMD/ATI have (largely) not done this, so seems a little illogical, although AMD pull their fair of marketting tricks (just normally to the financial sector though lol).
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