ATI, Nvidia Reveal New $250 Graphics Cards 84
ThinSkin writes "As part of their 'Spring Refresh,' both AMD and Nvidia reveal new $250 graphics cards, the Radeon 4890 and GeForce GTX 275. ExtremeTech takes both cards and runs them through a gamut of gaming and synthetic benchmarks to decide which card triumphs over the other. Long story short, the GeForce takes the cake with impressive performance at its price, while the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."
Beware (Score:4, Interesting)
The Inquirer (I know, they hate nVidia with a passion) is speculating that the GT275 may be a relabeled GT260, except for reviewer cards which may be relabeled GT280's: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/599/1051599/nvidia-hoodwinks-reviewers-mythical-gt275s [theinquirer.net]
I guess this is common for ATI/AMD and nVidia to do, but it's the first I've heard of it and it seems awful slimy.
Seems highly unlikely (Score:4, Interesting)
The 275 is something of a "cross" between a 260 and 280. The 280 has 240 shader cores, 1GB of RAM and a 512-bit memory bus. The 260 has 192 or 216 cores depending on the version 896MB of memory and a 448-bit memory bus. They are both 65nm parts. Well the 275 is a 55nm part and nVidia's spec page says it has 240 shader cores, 896MB of memory and a 448-bit memory bus. Hence like I said, a cross between the old two.
Ok well that leave one of two situations for the Inquirer conspiracy theory:
1) nVidia is giving the reviewers cards with more RAM. Possible, but not likley. Also, wouldn't give significantly better results. Turns out that much RAM isn't useful for games these days.
2) nVidia is lying on their product spec page. They are sending 240sp versions to reviewers, and 192 or 216 core versions to the public. Very unlikely, they'd get sued for false advertising.
I just don't buy it. I suppose in theory they could do something like increase the clocks on review cards, but that is real likley to get noticed. Those reviewers know how to run utilities like GPU-Z as well as the rest of us.
I am starting to think nVidia needs to sue Charlie Demerjian for libel. There's not much question his intent is malicious, and he certainly puts out false information. His only defense would be that he didn't know it was false and of course that brings up the question as to why he didn't check, being a journalist and all.
I'll believe this if someone has some kind of real proof, but this seems totally unsubstantiated.
Re:Funny (Score:3, Interesting)
In perfect competition price = marginal cost and unless there's cost differences there shouldn't be a price difference either. Even if you include the write-down costs of assets for a sustainable zero profit operation it still shouldn't differ. The situation is more like this: Around here there's three gas stations very close to each other and they're usually within... in USD, 0.015$/liter. Why? Because it's damn hard to sell overpriced gas if doing a live market survey takes less than a minute. When someone starts with cutthroat pricing they'll all follow and so they all bleed. And none of them can afford to bleed for very long, so when someone raises prices again they follow back up. It doesn't take many rounds of that before you get an implicit collusion - if you don't start we don't start and we all turn a nice profit. Explicit collusion would be all agreeing to add a price hike on top of that. But in all cases the prices are the same across all three, all the way from cutthroat competition to blatant anti-trust violation.