airborne11b :
Actually, he hit the nail on the head, and you amd fanboys just don't get it.
AMD / ATI a LONG time ago had great price/performance, and nvidia was always the expensive powerhouse.
But for past few years Nvidia has always offered GPUs at around the same price/performance as ATI.
Sure, you can point to a few cards from ATI that have +5% performance gain for maybe 10 or 20 bucks cheaper then the Nvidia alternative, but as he pointed out, there are many cards offered by Nvidia that outperform same priced / slightly more expensive ATI cards.
Point is that prices are never so drastically different that it actually matters.
The things that matter most now a days are features, driver quality, build quality, etc. That choice comes down to each buyer. Some people want 3D vision 2, not ATI's junk 3D tech. Some people want +5% performance in crossfire to stroke their epeen on a non-visually noticeable difference.
Hell, if you even bothered to pay attention to most of the benches done by this website, much of the "Price/Performance" really depends on the games you choose to play (Some favor Nvidia, some favor ATI).
But honestly, who cares, 7000 gains over the year and a half old 500 series were a huge let-down. I expected much more out of ATI. I have a feeling Kepler is going to shame ATI this time around due to such small advancement in performance over 6000s. So lets wait and see what benches look when not comparing 18 month old tech VS stuff that is just a few days old lol.
The 7950 can be overclocked to roughly equal a 6990 and the 7970 can be overclocked slightly beyond the 6990. With the overclocks, it's a roughly 100% improvement in performance with only a ~65% increase in cost and insignificant increase in power usage at load (actually, a decrease in idle power usage).
How will Kepler do? I don't know. Nvidia seems to be having some problems because as I've stated and several others, only Nvidia is having troubles on TSMC's 28nm node. That leads me to believe that it might not be the GPU process, but something else is a problem(s), but Nvidia isn't doing much talking and that really doesn't get my hopes up. In fact, I previously also thought that Kepler may be better than GCN because it is more than a die shrink and new architecture, it is also abandoning hot-clocking which should improve performance per watt. See, no, I'm not an AMD fanboy. I didn't change the opinion in favor of AMD yet because it is apparent that AMD is also having other problems, but they seem to stem from AMD's engineers not understanding video card performance scaling very well. That is something that Nvidia has yet to screw up, although that may have been more inadvertently then intentionally because increasing the core count when it is still a low number compared to AMD's will give more linear improvements than higher core counts getting even more cores (the % increase from 256 to 512 is slightly greater than 1024 to 2048). Seeing as how this is AMD's favorite way to differentiate cards despite it NOT helping as much as clock rates (as shown in the differences between a 7870 and a 7950, among many other examples).
AMD cards are still generally a better buy for gamers that don't need CUDA. I already compared all of Nvidia's GTX 500 line with the Radeons and stated the problems so it's up to you to actually think about it yourself and pay attention. The only reason that some games favor Nvidia is because Nvidia pays the developers to optimize for the Nvidia cards instead of both Nvidia and AMD to show artificial weakness in AMD cards. If AMD could afford to do this as much then they probably would engage in it too, but AMD really can't afford to do it so only Nvidia is.
I've already addressed Kepler and recognized it as GCN Radeon's primary competitor, but it's nowhere to be found right now so there is nothing else but the GTX 500s to compare the GCN Radeons to.
If there is no noticeable difference between CF's superior scaling and SLI, then it wouldn't be helpful. What card is faster, the GTX 570 or the 6950 2GB for 1080p? The GTX 570 obviously is and it costs ~$100 more. You can get two of them in SLI. You can get two Radeon 6950s in CF instead and save ~$200 to get the same performance and still be able to get another 6950 later on. Clearly there is a better winner here and it's not the 570 SLI setup that would use far more power, be far more expensive, have far less memory, all for similar performance. Like I said, there is a clear winner here.
I already went into fair detail about the GTX 500 cards and their better Radeon alternatives. Sure, some games were optimized to not work as well on a Radeon as they do on a Nvidia card. Those games may be better off with the Nvidia card (preferably the 560 TI, the other Nvidia cards all have serious problems to consider), but that is only because Nvidia decided against playing fair with AMD.
Ignore current Radeon 7800 benchmarks because they were done with drivers even worse than those used on 7900 and will probably have better versions when they launch. However, AMD has some seriously odd stuff going on with GCN Radeons right now so it's very hard to say how this will all turn out. For example, we have the 7850 not even stable and the 7870 sometimes it's just beating the 6950, but some other times it's performance is indistinguishable from the 7950.
Then we have the GHz edition 7770 that has a TDP just ever so slightly over 75w so it can't be used without the PCIe connector. Honestly AMD, why not just lower it's voltage and/or clock rates a little so it doesn't need the 6 pin connector? AMD has shown that even their stock voltages are capable of FAR more performance than they are being used for, there is no excuse for AMD either not increasing clock rates further or decreasing voltage and thus power usage further. The GCN cards have some confusing quirks that AMD should address immediately and it's not just their lack of proper CF support that is worrisome.
Also, no, he did not hit the nail on the head, but he did miss it and hit his finger instead. I didn't just point to a few AMD cards that are better than a few GTX 500s, I pointed to Radeons that were better than ALL of the GTX 50 lineup. It's not just raw performance you must consider and AMD is not just 5% faster in some cases. The 550 TI is an extreme case, it is FAR more expensive than similarly performing Radeons. The prices do matter, but I'll admit they aren't the only thing. I'd say that it's the Radeons that should be more expensive with the way things are right now, not the Nvidia cards. However, then I'd be pissed at AMD for not being cheaper than slightly/moderately (depending on the cards being compared) worse Nvidia cards anymore. At least in the past, the Nvidia cards didn't always have such other disadvantages when they were more expensive, now they have more problems than just their price for their performance.
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