Price wars are great for the consumer. That's exactly what's going on in the high-end graphics card market.
A week (or two?) ago AMD released their flagship graphics card, the R9 290X. (Check out Anandtech review here) It was priced fairly cheaper than the competition yet delivering performance similar to a card that's almost two times more expensive. Of course it is not a perfect card. The reference cards (which are the only ones available) run louder, hotter and draw a lot of power. However, the price to performance ratio excelled past the competition.
If you thought NVidia was going to do nothing about it, then you are a fool. You can give a million fancy features (example) but in the end of the day, gamers want more performance and less price. Even though NVidia GeForce cards probably have a slight edge on that (features) department, people are going to settle for the faster and cheaper AMD card.
Hence, we have good news. NVidia has come to their senses. They are dropping prices on the GTX770 and GTX780. In fact, they are dropping prices by record levels this time around. Here's what's proposed by NVidia to the card vendors.
GTX 770: $399 → $329
GTX780: $649 → $499
And that's not all. There is the GTX780 Ti. It packs impressive specs and leaked results claim that it is about 5% faster than the Titan. That's sweet and that actually would take the performance crown back to the green side. But the price isn't going to interest many gamers out there. $699. Ouch! Well, it is still better than the Titan if you have a 1440p or smaller display. But I still believe the R9 290X is better priced. Sure sure, you always get diminishing returns when you go up in the spectrum.
On the other hand, leaked results show that the R9 290 (the non-X model) still is slightly faster than the GTX780. And that's coming out at $449 price mark. Hopefully it will run cooler than the 290X. That's the only problem with the 290X. Fortunately, if you are thinking of buying a R9 290X, it seems that the non-reference design cards are coming out next month. Let's hope that Twin Frozr cooler, DCUII cooler or Winforce3 cooler will keep the card running below 80C.
Would you choose a R9 290X over a GTX780 Ti because it is cheaper and only performs slightly slower? Would you choose the R9 290 over the GTX780 if they perform similarly? Would you get a GTX770 over a R9 280X even though they have almost the same price to performance ratio? I guess with the current pricing, you would be fine with either team.
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