I had written a long rant sometime ago on the steep pricing increases on GPU's. Now I think a lot more peopl will agree to this:
And here it is:
Ok since you seem to know so much about how AMD works, lets go back a couple of generations.
The highest single GPU card in the 5xxx series was the 5870...right? Costed around 18-20k when it was released..
Then AMD decided to change the naming criteria and the highest card in the 6xxx lineup was the 6970. Again was priced between 19-22k at the time of release..and BTW, they completely overran the market as the competition was GTX 4XX, which was by all accounts not doing to well...
Then came the 7xxx series and suddenly AMD decides that the 79xx series is way high end and lets charge a bomb, since we have no competition...sounds like a plan right, so we as customers got the new high end at around 35-39k, which is almost twice the price of the older high end cards..and overclocking had probably very little to do with pricing...
Then Nvidia decides that well, this pricing suits as fine as well...BUT, or new high end AKA GF110, can really beat the crap out of AMD 7970/7950/7990, so lets release mid end cards with the same nomenclature as the previous high end cards and lets price them similar or slightly lower than the 79xx series and then lets have some fun.
So here we are now, with AMD pushing in some price cuts in the high end and Nvidia again rocking their boat with the 670, which looks like a mid end card from each and every angle. It performs so well, that it competes with the high end of AMD and so again Nvvidia looks at a much higher price than they imagined they could have sold it for.
So who's fault is it?
AMD for staring to double the price of their high end cards, or Nvidia who did not have a competitor to the 79xx series at launch. It really does not matter to me as I dont own shares of any of the companies, but the bottom line is the new Rs. 20k card is now the new Rs. 35k card and that hurts us the most.
And in any case, if looking back at the 6xxx series, that too could have been priced higher as the GTX 4xx series was a massive failure in its first iteration. Anyway, I am sure you have your own thoughts on this, but basically its only the customer who is getting screwed over.
So here we go again with a huge price on a mid range card that was supposed to be the successor to the popular 560Ti.