79XX Price drop imminent.

[pugheaven]

Don't think it'll make much difference until AMD is £100+ cheaper than nvidia, then I think that may get people back... at the moment, I think they're screwed IMHO. And that's not going to happen, think alot of people (including me) weren't that bothered by it's performance anyway, it was badly overpriced to start with, not really moved on much... and its now outclassed badly by the 680... if AMD want's a cut, they need to do what they did with the 6970/580... make it available for £100+ quid cheaper than the nvidia 680.. then people will buy it. Last year the 6970 was around £275 while the 580 was around £380... AMD had a nice big chunk of the market... they need to get real... or release a 7980 which would be nicely overclocked to put it on a par?

If I was buying now, I'd not touch Ati with a barge pole... sick of their crappy drivers and problems (4850, 5830, 6990)... so much so, I'm thinking of getting shut of these 6990's now... and go back to nVidia.

[Kaotika]

Don't think it'll make much difference until AMD is £100+ cheaper than nvidia, then I think that may get people back... at the moment, I think they're screwed IMHO. And that's not going to happen, think alot of people (including me) weren't that bothered by it's performance anyway, it was badly overpriced to start with, not really moved on much... and its now outclassed badly by the 680... if AMD want's a cut, they need to do what they did with the 6970/580... make it available for £100+ quid cheaper than the nvidia 680.. then people will buy it. Last year the 6970 was around £275 while the 580 was around £380... AMD had a nice big chunk of the market... they need to get real... or release a 7980 which would be nicely overclocked to put it on a par?
[/COLOR]

6970/580 performance difference was also a lot bigger than 7970/680 is - 580 is ~16-19% faster than 6970, while 680 is only ~2.5-5.5% faster than 7970 (1920x1200 & 2560x1600 resolutions, TPU)

The various OC'd 7970 parts make the release of 7980 quite a moot idea, unless they actually rework the chip to make it more gaming oriented like Pitcairn (aka less FP64 performance) which is more than unlikely scenario to happen

Sapphire's Toxic edition comes with 1150/1500MHz clocks (and available at 6GB mem too), which goes way past stock 680 levels, and those few OC models I've seen released so far - of course manual overclocking is always luck of the draw though, just talking "out-of-box".

[kitch9]

The cards do seem to have dropped in price, but the cheapest over @ OCUK is now £395.99, nowhere near the £360 kitch suggests. In short, barely cheaper than a GTX 680 and still too much.

At current conversions that is 620+ dollars. A bargain.

I don't think price drop is in force yet, wait until Monday.

[Raptor156]

while 680 is only ~2.5-5.5% faster than 7970 (1920x1200 & 2560x1600 resolutions, TPU)

Lol, no... I've owned both cards.

[Kaotika]

Lol, no... I've owned both cards.

Surely it depends a lot on how much if at all you've OCd cards, which games you play and test, the rest of the machine etc, however those are rounded numbers from TPU in their tests, stock clocks, their machine, the result is performance calculated from 16 games and 2 synthetic tests.

edit:
The exact numbers are 5.6% at 1920x1200, 2.3% at 2560x1600

[red_dog007]

A few weeks too late, maybe?

They are still in the clear. Nvidia seems to not have made many chips if Newegg is still sold out of them. So while the 680 exists and is out there in the wild, it seems to be a very rare breed. So really, the 79xx cards are still the dominate cat. Charge the same price, have unknowingly prey buy their products at the high price while AMD waits for the 680 to pop its head out indefinitely before it drops their price.

I really hope that Nvidia still isn't having yield issues. They might have a good product, but if yields suck, that will still hurt Nvidia deeply unless they can feasibly rebin a lot of them.

[Link316]

If I was buying now, I'd not touch Ati with a barge pole... sick of their crappy drivers and problems (4850, 5830, 6990)... so much so, I'm thinking of getting shut of these 6990's now... and go back to nVidia.

Id take one lol

[icemanchilled]

Surely it depends a lot on how much if at all you've OCd cards, which games you play and test, the rest of the machine etc, however those are rounded numbers from TPU in their tests, stock clocks, their machine, the result is performance calculated from 16 games and 2 synthetic tests.

edit:
The exact numbers are 5.6% at 1920x1200, 2.3% at 2560x1600

More averaged crapola from TPU, the averages are completely meaningless. Each of us has to look at the results subjectively and take into account the games we own and play. Just spouting off the average results tells us nothing, for example; 5.6% and 2.3% doesn't tell you that the 7970 is actually comfortably faster in AvP, Battleforge and very close in a number of others. Equally, it doesn't tell you when one of the cards has a clear win, which the 680 does in a number of titles.

Just repeating averages is not doing either card a favour, we don't run several benchmarks on our setups and then proceed to work out what the average fps was across all those games, we look at the individual results for each game, because working out the average is pointless and tells us nothing.

--- Post Update ---

Surely it depends a lot on how much if at all you've OCd cards, which games you play and test, the rest of the machine etc, however those are rounded numbers from TPU in their tests, stock clocks, their machine, the result is performance calculated from 16 games and 2 synthetic tests.

edit:
The exact numbers are 5.6% at 1920x1200, 2.3% at 2560x1600

You even say the same thing here, it depends on which individual games you play, which renders the averages meaningless.

[QuadDamage]

They are still in the clear. Nvidia seems to not have made many chips if Newegg is still sold out of them. So while the 680 exists and is out there in the wild, it seems to be a very rare breed. So really, the 79xx cards are still the dominate cat. Charge the same price, have unknowingly prey buy their products at the high price while AMD waits for the 680 to pop its head out indefinitely before it drops their price.

I really hope that Nvidia still isn't having yield issues. They might have a good product, but if yields suck, that will still hurt Nvidia deeply unless they can feasibly rebin a lot of them.

newegg is sold out because these cards sell faster than those poor bastards at Foxconn can make them. I don't have any sales numbers at hand but i guarantee you the GTX680 is the fastest selling graphics card ever made.

ATi isn't "in the clear" - they never were. The 79xx was nowhere to be seen even two months after official launch and now that the cheaper and faster card is out nobody gives a crap about the 7970.

[Kaotika]

More averaged crapola from TPU, the averages are completely meaningless. Each of us has to look at the results subjectively and take into account the games we own and play. Just spouting off the average results tells us nothing, for example; 5.6% and 2.3% doesn't tell you that the 7970 is actually comfortably faster in AvP, Battleforge and very close in a number of others. Equally, it doesn't tell you when one of the cards has a clear win, which the 680 does in a number of titles.

Just repeating averages is not doing either card a favour, we don't run several benchmarks on our setups and then proceed to work out what the average fps was across all those games, we look at the individual results for each game, because working out the average is pointless and tells us nothing.

--- Post Update ---



You even say the same thing here, it depends on which individual games you play, which renders the averages meaningless.

Average tells the average, of course if you only play handfull of games you should just check those, but many of play wide variety of games, in which case averages are highly useful as they soften out the few games in which the performance difference is bigger than usual