the recent base pricing for RX590 and Radeon 7 clearly shows that AMD will not going to undercut nvidia to the point some people hope it to be. people hope AMD will make things more affordable for the mass public but if you have been aware what has been happening in this past few weeks the one that force the price to drop is not AMD but nvidia instead.
You mean those cards that were likely the result of that Radeon Technology Group executive that AMD "retired" less than a year after hiring? >_>
I was just tipped off about a pretty big shakeup to AMD's leadership: Michael J. Rayfield has just retired from his position as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. This decision happened today and I have heard some pretty interesting chatter about the...
wccftech.com
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He presented suggestions that werent really feasible such as ‘Radeon VII‘ which was to be a Vega 20 based consumer facing part that cost $750 to build and would barely tie in with an [NVIDIA] GTX 1080 Ti."
Those might have been rumors, but considering the informant revealed the Radeon VII as a failed project well before that card was announced or even on anyone's radar, it seems likely that there's some truth to them. At the very least, AMD's official stance that it was an "ordinary retirement" seems a bit hard to believe when the guy just joined the company in the beginning of that year.
The Radeon VII design was already completed by that point, so AMD ended up releasing it, but with its large amount of expensive HBM2 memory, which likely couldn't be cut down without hurting performance, the card is simply too expensive to manufacture to be competitive against the RTX 20-series. The same goes for the prior Vega parts, which AMD could only reduce the prices of so much, similarly making them uncompetitive against their 20-series counterparts.
And the RX 590 was bizarrely priced at launch, being only around 10% faster than an RX 580, which could already be found for around $200 or less at that point. The RX 590 and Radeon VII might have been somewhat more viable at those price points had they been released a year earlier, but they had no business getting launched alongside Nvidia's 20-series. It's perhaps no coincidence that executive's "retirement" was announced in the weeks following the RX 590's launch.
So, Radeon VII and RX 590 pricing is likely not going to be indicative of what Navi pricing will be like. AMD knows they need to provide significantly better value than what Nvidia is offering, due to their current market dominance and the fact their cards released around half a year earlier. Add to that Nvidia's recent support of adaptive sync on FreeSync displays, and AMD no longer has that advantage going for them. Then, there's Raytracing, which AMD's cards will undoubtedly support in some form, but it's difficult to say whether they will feature dedicated hardware with RT performance similar to Nvidia's RTX cards. I have my doubts about the prices and performance levels being as described in that "leaked" information from some months back, but I do think we'll see better value than what Nvidia is currently offering.
As for Nvidia "forcing prices to drop" with their recent 16-series cards, if you look at the actual performance-per-dollar that these cards offer, they are only now starting to catch up to the value that AMD has been offering for months with the RX 580 and 570, and even there they are still a little behind. Supposedly, the 1650 might offer performance near that of a 1060 3GB or RX 570, but it's also rumored to be priced around $150, while many RX 570s could be found for less for quite a while now. The lower power draw could be good to have, but value-wise they aren't really bringing much new to the table. The performance gains might look decent compared to Nvidia's prior cards, but that's only because Nvidia hadn't dropped the prices of those cards at all since they launched back in 2016. Considering the time that has passed since the 10-series launched, these performance gains are actually quite mediocre.