[citation][nom]magicandy[/nom]You'll have to do better than that AMD when for $20 more a GTX 680 mops the floor with the 7970. Not looking good for AMD at the moment, in both GPUs and CPUs.[/citation]
The GTX 680 does not mop the floor with the 7970. In Crysis 2 and Metro 2033, the 7970 wins. For BF3 and several other games, they are nearly tied. Only in some games does the 680 have a significant lead and even then, the 7970 is NEVER far behind.
[citation][nom]LuckyDucky7[/nom]Except that's not enough. The 5770/6770 runs this card down and those things are 99 bucks. Not to mention frequently finding the vastly superior 6850 at $140. Unless they're offering the three free games for that I still don't see the point.[/citation]
The 7770 performs on par with the Radeon 6850 (very slightly behind it, I can not stress the very slightly enough). At the same price range as the 6850 and 6870 (7770 overclocked should match the 6870 even if the 6870 is overclocked), it is a great deal. It also uses less power than them, so over time, even at the same price and performance, it is the better deal. Also, if you find the 6770 for $99, then that's a pretty good deal considering that they usually cost $110 to $120, right below the 6790.
[citation][nom]matt_b[/nom]Good move and thumbs up for not only a decent price drop, but a fairly solid game bundle as well. I was really hoping for a drop on the 7800 series as well, but I didn't hold my hopes too high.[/citation]
I find that the 7800 series isn't really overpriced like the 7700 and 7900 series were, so I don't think that it's a big deal if 7800 cards didn't drop in price. The 7850 performs between the 6950 2GB and 6970 (sometimes it beats the 6970) and the 7870 performs right behind the 7950, 5970, and GTX 580.
[citation][nom]ivan1984[/nom]I was really hoping for price drops on the 7800 series. What's the point of getting a 7870 for $350 when you get get a 7950 for $50 more?.[/citation]
The point is that the 7950 is only faster than the 7870 if you overclock it. Basically, at stock, you just pay for the memory and memory bandwidth advantage which amount to pointless, except for Eyefinity resolutions.
We also need to take into consideration that with these new cards, there is lower power usage. This decreases cost over time compared to the previous generations that use much more power. Even if the Radeon 7700/7800/7900 cards were slightly more expensive than similarly performing Radeon 6000 cards, they were the better buy. The large price differences were what made this irrelevant. Now that prices are more where they should be more or less across the board for Radeon 7000, this matters much more.