In fact, when I started writing this intro (Wednesday morning) I still had no idea what the prices for these parts would actually be. Both companies withheld final pricing information until the very last minute. AMD and NVIDIA saw this as an opportunity to release cards that fell within this spectrum, and they are battling intensely over price. This created a gap in pricing between about $190 and $300.
The truth of the matter is that neither one of these cards is particularly new, they are both a balance of processors, memory, and clock speeds at a new price point.Īs the prices on the cards that already offered a very good value fell, higher end and dual GPU cards remained priced significantly higher. If you asked AMD what the GeForce GTX 275 was, you'd probably get "half of a GTX 295". If you asked NVIDIA what the Radeon HD 4890 was, you'd probably hear something like "an overclocked 4870". We hadn't even laid hands on the 275, but AMD knew what it was and where it was going to be priced. Then in the middle of our Radeon HD 4890 briefing what do we see but a reference to a GeForce GTX 275 in the slides. NVIDIA wanted to send us something special. Before we even got our Radeon HD 4890, before we were even briefed on it, NVIDIA contacted us and told us that if we were working on a review to wait. I'm not really sure why we have NDAs on these products anymore.