I'm sorry but this I just find hilarious.
A Ferrari you buy for €200.000 is still a Ferrari when the prices are dropped and people can buy it at €100.000. Not even a name change to Lamborghini will change the fact that IS and will always BE a Ferrari.
The thing is that it's deceiving people. It's already happening with the current renaming of 8800GT to 9800GT. I am seeing unsuspecting people (who do not know much about videocards like the the average B3D visitor) who bought a 8800GT 2 years ago buying a new 9800GT simply because the name is "1 generation" higher so they think it's faster. You should see their faces when I tell them they just bought the same card. When stuff like that happens and when the instore clerics fail to tell the customers they're about to buy the same cards... That IS bad imo.
What are you talking about, AMD/ATi has done this when they could remain competitive in a certain price range, nV have always done this to get rid of inventory and also if its compartive in a price range. For AMD they still have the same inventory issues as nV, they failed to mention this in their last conference call, other ommisions such as margins, (they did talk about ASP's though, but not margins), a stop gate to get rid of as much left over inventory, what is AMD going to do with their's, sell their cards to Dell and HP at lower prices so they can sell them months after a new gen comes out? Thats what has been happening for the past 3 or so year with ATi cards. Great, nV renames thier cards and sells them for less, I see nothing wrong with that, if a person is to buy a card that doesn't know what they are buying, they go by thier budget. Now halo effect is there but whats in a person's pocket is much more important if they are ready to buy becaiuse of the economy. If its deceptive to rename products, lets sit on 3 month inventory for the next year where OEM's get rid of older cards. Great for nV and AMD don't you think? Do you remember when the Dell finally got next gen card replacements for their 38xx series?
You might know it's the same card, but a lot of (average joe) people do not. It's just simply misleading to put a higher name tag on an older card. No matter who does it, AMD or nV. But I guess we'll never agree on that one. So let's just agree to disagree.
Higher gen name at a lower price, they should understand if its lower price then what they already had, they should look into it. Consumer stupidty is always how marketers win, doesn't matter the industry or company.
There's nothing wrong with trying to clean up the naming mess you've got in your lineup. But doing it like this just seems to me like trying to get rid of that nasty nVentory in a very devious way.
Look at AMD's inventory issues....... Are they going to take another write off?
So what happens when you even the odds and do some overclocking on the HD4870?
Hmm don't think he was stating it that way.....
Not really. At that time the NV drivers were already optimized for multi-core CPUs in DX10, while the Radeons got their multicore boost in the 8.12 Hotfix. So it wasn't really apples to apples and some applications get a relatively very big boost on Radeon cards after the hotfix was applied.
Hmm that isn't very correct the hot fix for AMD cards performance was in limited scenories.
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,674995/Catalyst-91-WHQL-benchmark-review/Practice/?page=2
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/catalyst-91_2.html#sect0
Seems to me it has more affect for the x2 cards.
Before you say there was no mention of inventory problems at AMD, they expected to gain marketshare this quarter, and actually they lost, even though there was no statement of loss of marketshare, if we look at total sales figures of the GPU market and quarter to quarter growth its pertty easy to see there was loss so thier usally amount of sales to fabrication shifted (a fairly large shift), there has to be extra inventory.
