NVIDIA cards are overpriced

I think most people who've been following the industry will take one look at that title and think "duh". I admit I haven't been keeping up with graphics card prices lately, because I've been trying hard not to shop for one, even though the 8800GTX I'm using right now doesn't do Crysis enough justice by my standards, and it's because of that I've yet to beat the game, or buy the standalone expansion to it.

What brought on this observation was an investigative article on Anandtech that came across my feeds the other day about GTX 275 overclocking. I felt it was a relevant article to read at the time because shader VS core scaling has been an interesting issue with NVIDIA cards since the G80, and also because I was bored at the time. The article pointed to a preceding article that investigated the same topic with the 4890, and I decided to look over that one as well since I hadn't been keeping up with that card. I was surprised to find that the 4890 actually keeps toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's current fastest single-GPU card the GTX 285, in the most intensive games (read: the only games that matter to those shopping for a new GPU right now). But then it seems you can overclock the 4890 higher than the GTX 285, percentage-wise. Well then I got curious about where they stand price-wise.

I found out NVIDIA cards are overpriced. I mean, they are REALLY fuckin overpriced. It's ridiculous. On NewEgg I found most GTX 285 cards to be nearly $100 more expensive than a basic HD 4890! Why isn't there a bigger deal being made out of this than there is? When's the last time either company has been so grossly out-performed at any price point? For years they had been maintaining utter parity with one another, with one company hardly able to sneeze without the other saying "achoo". It's like the graphics market is moving so slow people have become disinterested in what's been happening. And who can blame them? "New" releases have been nothing more than rebrandings and price adjustments. At least the 4890 is a slightly tweaked core, NVIDIA sure as shit can't even claim to have done that much. The most they've done was a die-shrink of the GT200 and they made at least four new cards out of that. It's been overplayed, and it's old news now.

Even the GTX 275 is typically more expensive than a 4890. I guess that's supposed to be the real competitor to the 4890 but I don't see it. I guess it only shows during gameplay evaluations but it's a whole 'nother story with canned benchmarks. Which do you believe? Then there's the HD 4770 which is a new GPU that kicks the utter crap out of the latest G92 reincarnation, the GTS 250. If you can find one in stock it'll only run you around $100, but the GTS 250 is typically a good $20 more expensive, with the virtually useless 1GB version costing about $10 extra on top of that. It may not sound like much but we're talking about something like a 30% increase here. Slim price differences mean everything in the sub-$200 market. NVIDIA's closest competitor price-wise is the aging 9800GT.

Although hard to believe from the tone of this rambling, I'd actually describe myself as being a near-fanboy of NVIDIA. Normally I don't seriously consider AMD cards because I just don't like their drivers compared to NVIDIA's. I also find the underlying technology NVIDIA uses in their GPUs more interesting, but right now I'm not seeing what justifies such a disparate price difference between their stuff and AMD's. Maybe they wanna point to PhysX and crap but I don't buy it. The latest flagship game to support PhysX is Cryostasis, which is a mediocre game according to most reviews. Before that was Mirror's Edge, which hardly saw night-and-day differences with the feature's addition. So you're not selling PhysX yet NVIDIA, and at this rate it looks like you probably never will. No one is going to pay $100 more for a power-hungry chip that hardly performs better than its competition, especially when overclocking is considered.

What I find the most funny out of all this is how AMD supposedly stopped caring about the highest-end performance range a couple years ago. But even with a smaller chip, look at what they ended up accomplishing, all because the market's been stagnating and NVIDIA's been twittling their thumbs. Most people are just bored to tears right now over the whole thing. Man I can't wait til GT300....