[Rant] There goes my R9 290X dream down the toilet

AMD released their flagship graphics card, namely the R9 290X couple of weeks ago. The card was priced at $550, which when compared with the competition, was cheaply priced. But $550 is not cheap indeed. I wanted wait and see how the R9 290 would perform like because it would be considerably cheaper than the big brother while only being slightly slower. That has been the case with both NVidia and AMD families. 

R9 290 is coming out in a week. The expected price is $449.

But I was keen to know how the 290X would be priced in Japan as that's what matters to me. (I'm currently living in Japan by the way). Amazingly, even after two week, the card is still not up for sale in Japan. It seems the cards are out of stock everywhere in the world. AMD seems to have only made a handful of cards. That sucks really, especially as NVidia cut prices to remain competitive. AMD could have made a lot of money in the first week if there were enough 290X cards.   NVidia's price cuts came only after a few days.

Anyways, I search the internet and came across one post that suggested the 290X would cost about ¥71,000. That's $160 (or ¥16,000) more expensive than the US price. With the cards like the Palit GTX 780 Super Jetstream available for like ¥65,000 (still overpriced though), 290X won't do well with that price - especially being a reference card. Super Jetstream is a heavily binned card and comes with a massive cooler and a big factory overclock. Even with the factory overclock, it might overclock better than the 290X. So basically, the GTX 780 is the better choice, unless you have a 4K display. I'm sure most people haven't even heard of 4K displays yet, but you never know about these Japanese. They are crazy.

If the card is not cheaper than ¥60,000, there is no point even looking to buy this card. I would be better off getting a second GTX670. But I really hate to get multiple graphics cards because of the potential issues with it. However, if I can get a G-Sync enabled monitor at the same time, I would probably not see the micro-stuttering. Basically, my R9 290X dream is dead. Even if the 290 comes out at $449 in the USA, that would cost well above ¥55,000 here. That too, is not affordable. 

Did NVidia price the GeForce Titan too high?

The recently released NVidia Titan graphics card is the most expensive single GPU graphics card out in the market. US$1000!!! That's in the same ballpark as their flagship dual GPU graphics card, the GTX690. And it is not even faster than the GTX690 except in cases where the 2GB frame buffer (per GPU) comes becomes the bottleneck. That usually happens in multi display setups that work at a huge resolution.

 

What would have happened if NVidia dropped the prices of the entire lineup and released the Titan at around $700? I know that would open up a whole new opportunities for the consumer but what would have happened to profits of NVidia?

 

So Titan priced at $700, GTX680 priced at $400, GTX690 priced at $800, and rest of the line up following the same pattern.

 

Why they should have done it?

 

• The chances are that everyone who's got a 1440p screen would settle for one or few Titans instead of GTX680s. High resolution is where the Titan shines because of its 6GB frame buffer.
• People who are settling for one Titan might even buy two Titans without much hesitation. Or even three. Heck, we even see people running Titans in SLI at the current price.
• Even people who have previously bought a GTX 680s would upgrade to the Titan. That means NVidia would be able to sell two products in the same generation. That usually never happens. Even I might consider getting a Titan to replace my GTX670. But $700 is still a little too steep for me.
• NVidia would be able to grab a portion of AMD sales - at least initially. Not because they priced Titan lower, but because they dropped the prices of the entire line up. AMD would have to fight back with more price cuts.

Why I think they priced it correctly (or why they shouldn’t have done it)