Sure, but who cares?
If you can get close to the competition's performance for a lower cost while still reaching 90% of your customers, it's a reasonable trade-off. AMD has been doing for years.
The 384-bit interface for 7970 was dictated by HPC, IMO. That's where bandwidth is king.
No stats here, but if I were to buy a new GPU, I'd go for a fast one, even if overkill. Money is often less of an objection than the space of 3 big monitors and the wife who complains about them.Honestly, I don't know. A 7970 seems kind of overkill for a single 1080p monitor, to me anyway, but does the rest of the world feel the same? I've never seen any stats, so I don't know.
Here in germany they're actually pretty available - not from every shop at every single point in time, but you could always get one provided your willingness to shell out 500+ EUR.
Don't forget that speeding up your RAM interface is more than getting the PHY to run faster. There's a huge amount of very complicated logic behind it to drive it. Even if it runs at 1/4 the speed, that's 1.35GHz if your interface is operating at 5.5GT/s. Speeding this up is a lot of effort.
Must be that slow European economy everyone keeps talking about (sorry)
Who said anything about just newegg? http://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/amd/7970/. Of course you can get one, but that's not the point. The point is that volumes aren't sufficient for nVidia to start panicking and spreading FUD to slow sales.
So you have to be tripping over them before people would buy one over the competition? and your link looks to track 3 whole sites.
Who said anything about just newegg? http://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/amd/7970/. Of course you can get one, but that's not the point. The point is that volumes aren't sufficient for nVidia to start panicking and spreading FUD to slow sales.
do we think the 7950 is going to use the same PCB as the 7970? are we sure they are going to go with 3gig GDDR5?!
Basically, the only conclusion that we can come to is that demand is relatively equal to supply at this point.
Just to add a little bit to that, sales aren't ever going to be particularly high for a high-end card anyway. With the relatively low volumes that are inherent in the high-end video card market, it's easier to run out of stock periodically for any product whose demand is relatively close to supply.
I'm not sure why you immediately jump to the conclusion that supply must be low if stock levels are constantly fluctuating. It could also be that supply is as high as it was for any previous enthusiast level card (well except GTX 480 which was pretty bad by most accounts) but that demand is just as high.
Basically, the only conclusion that we can come to is that demand is relatively equal to supply at this point.
We also know that demand for $550 graphics cards is low. It's not rocket science Just take a gander at where the 580's and 6970's of the world sit on Steam's charts.
Precisely.
Ehh, looking at an enthusiast gathering place like [H] forums, it seems like a LOT of people have already bought 7970's. Thus they didn't wait for anything. There was a thread something like "where to buy 7970" in the early days and it quickly grew very large, suggesting you know, a lot of people were buying 7970's.
I dont think you can state it's somehow not hurting Nvidia at all.
And if you're going on steam's charts..most people are probably playing on counter strike (which actually is constantly the most popular game on steam when you add up its varients, oh and "football manager 2012" apparently, surely vastly demanding) and gaming on 1280X1024 or something. In that case NONE of this Sea Islands/Kepler and the three generations prior either matters.
Manufacturing shutdown for CNY is about 1 week. It was known that it was going to occur so it has been planned for!supply must be low, simply because every single factory in greater china is practically non-functional for almost 2 weeks.