Nvidia stock downgraded, shares fall. Fermi at fault?

[kylew]

have you got a link? i would like to read it

It's a long read but I would say it's worth it.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/11/4/batmangate-amd-vs-nvidia-vs-eidos-fight-analyzed.aspx

 

[drunkenmaster]

Isn't bright side famous for being very anti nvidia?

No, they WERE about the second most pro Nvidia/anti AMD website on the net.

Both Fud and BSN have been spouting crap for 6 months on Fermi(well about a year actually) and badmouthing AMD the entire time, both have gotten rather bored of it and both seem quite peeved about the amount of misinformation they seem to recieve from Nvidia as both have been made to look complete fools as most sites on the net were laughing at the November release date while those two were constantly saying Nvidia are promising cards in 2009.

When the two biggest Nvidia fanboy sites are starting to lose faith, well, its not a good sign.

 

[Lightnix]

Isn't bright side famous for being very anti nvidia?

I think you're thinking of semiaccurate. I mean this is the 'most commented' list of articles from BSN:

OPINION: Are all AMD fans - idiots?
nVidia shows NV100/GF100 GPU running Unigine DX11 Benchmark
Is ATI's Eyefinity really that great or…?
AMD Community has 29 tough GF100 Questions for nVidia
GT300 Demo card was a Dummy; Does that really matter?
Buyer Beware: Zune HD Software bills you $50 without notice - NO refund!

 

[drunkenmaster]

nvidia wont go. No competition will make prices increase and the quality/power fo new products will decrease because there would be no competition to force the company to make more powerful cards to compete

nVidia are just not in full flow of producing there product but once its up and running it should be all good

AS per usual this is basically completely wrong, if AMD don't make a card twice as powerful, who'd buy it. If they just released the 5xxx series with 5% higher clocks and called it the 6xxx series, none of us would buy it. They'd sell loads in new computers, but the problem would come when developers wouldn't have any more power to program for, so new games would still run great on the 5xxx series, so people would stop upgrading. When people stop upgrading, cards stop being sold, and gfx cards stop being profitable.

The way for AMD to make profit, is to make better cards, and its got nothing to do with competition, well it does but, their OWN cards create competition because I won't buy a new card, unless my 5850 can't run newer games well, and a new card can.

IF Nvidia die, prices wouldn't change, why? Because Nvidia haven't had an answer to the 5850 for 6 months, retailers raised the prices, but if you shopped around you could get a 5850 at £200 any time in the past 6 months.

Pricing themselves out of the market, again stops people upgrading.

Unless theres a performance improvement big enough and its affordable enough to sell a quantity high enough to be profitable, they don't make profit.

A 260gtx at £300, they could have launched the 4850 at £180 and it would still have sold, why didn't they? They could sell 10 times as many and persaude 10 times as many people to upgrade at £120, as they could at £180. IT made them MORE profit to sell at that price, than to sell less at a higher price.

The 4xxx series pricing had nothing to do with Nvidia, Nvidia 2xx series prices were massively forced down after AMD set their pricing, NOT the other way around.

Likewise the 58xx pricing was set based on profits vs sales vs demand, the 285gtx was selling for more when a 5850 was launched, why launch at £200? because again they could sell a heck of a lot more at £200 than at £300, because thats life.

AMD is more than enough competition for itself, an upgrade always has to be affordable and worthwhile, if its not, you can't sell anything. Nvidia haven't provided a competition on price for the best part of 24 months.

 

[chaosquall]

was quite a long read lol

 

[Duran]

AS per usual this is basically completely wrong, if AMD don't make a card twice as powerful, who'd buy it. If they just released the 5xxx series with 5% higher clocks and called it the 6xxx series, none of us would buy it. They'd sell loads in new computers, but the problem would come when developers wouldn't have any more power to program for, so new games would still run great on the 5xxx series, so people would stop upgrading. When people stop upgrading, cards stop being sold, and gfx cards stop being profitable.

The way for AMD to make profit, is to make better cards, and its got nothing to do with competition, well it does but, their OWN cards create competition because I won't buy a new card, unless my 5850 can't run newer games well, and a new card can.

IF Nvidia die, prices wouldn't change, why? Because Nvidia haven't had an answer to the 5850 for 6 months, retailers raised the prices, but if you shopped around you could get a 5850 at £200 any time in the past 6 months.

Pricing themselves out of the market, again stops people upgrading.

Unless theres a performance improvement big enough and its affordable enough to sell a quantity high enough to be profitable, they don't make profit.

A 260gtx at £300, they could have launched the 4850 at £180 and it would still have sold, why didn't they? They could sell 10 times as many and persaude 10 times as many people to upgrade at £120, as they could at £180. IT made them MORE profit to sell at that price, than to sell less at a higher price.

The 4xxx series pricing had nothing to do with Nvidia, Nvidia 2xx series prices were massively forced down after AMD set their pricing, NOT the other way around.

Likewise the 58xx pricing was set based on profits vs sales vs demand, the 285gtx was selling for more when a 5850 was launched, why launch at £200? because again they could sell a heck of a lot more at £200 than at £300, because thats life.

AMD is more than enough competition for itself, an upgrade always has to be affordable and worthwhile, if its not, you can't sell anything. Nvidia haven't provided a competition on price for the best part of 24 months.

if nvidia is gone here how it goes i'll make it simple for you:
ati 4xxx series: amazing prices, ati was desperate for sales
ati 5xxx series: overpriced at launch and even more ovepriced later, ati is confident now
ati 6xxx series: vastly ovepriced like the nvidia 2xx series at launch, ati is cocky now

you are telling me that the gtx 260 wasnt priced competitively to the 4870 , the gtx 275 to the 4890 and the 250 to the 4850? £10 difference doesnt mean anything. in the real world 8 months ago nvidia was still vastly outselling ati. 6 months cant make up 3 years of great sales that put nvidia in control of 65% of the discrete cards market.

 

[kylew]

if nvidia is gone here how it goes i'll make it simple for you:
ati 4xxx series: amazing prices, ati was desperate for sales
ati 5xxx series: overpriced at launch and even more ovepriced later, ati is confident now
ati 6xxx series: vastly ovepriced like the nvidia 2xx series at launch, ati is cocky now

you are telling me that the gtx 260 wasnt priced competitively to the 4870 or the 250 to the 4850? £10 difference doesnt mean anything.

You've purposefully missed the majority of his point.

The 4 series? They weren't desperate for sales, don't you understand that the lower price they had them at made them MORE money? High prices doesn't mean more profit you know? The only time it means more profit is on individual sales.

The 5 series are grossly overpriced, but we know that it's a combination of things, poor yields and retailers heavily price gouging.

The 6 series? What's the point saying they're vastly overpriced? They're not out yet...

The GTX260 wasn't competitively priced though, not at all. The original 260 was priced far higher than a 4870, yet the 4850 was too close in performance.

The 4850 and 4870 was priced against nVidia's 9 series of cards.

 

[stinkas]

if nvidia is gone here how it goes i'll make it simple for you:
ati 4xxx series: amazing prices, ati was desperate for sales
ati 5xxx series: overpriced at launch and even more ovepriced later, ati is confident now
ati 6xxx series: vastly ovepriced like the nvidia 2xx series at launch, ati is cocky now

you are telling me that the gtx 260 wasnt priced competitively to the 4870 , the gtx 275 to the 4890 and the 250 to the 4850? £10 difference doesnt mean anything. in the real world 8 months ago nvidia was still vastly outselling ati. 6 months cant make up 3 years of great sales that put nvidia in control of 65% of the discrete cards market.

Actually Ati 4000 Series outsold Nvidia 200 Series...
Nvidia got it's market share advantage from the 8800 and it's rebrands, that however was long ago.

 

[queamin]

if nvidia is gone here how it goes i'll make it simple for you:
ati 4xxx series: amazing prices, ati was desperate for sales
ati 5xxx series: overpriced at launch and even more ovepriced later, ati is confident now
ati 6xxx series: vastly ovepriced like the nvidia 2xx series at launch, ati is cocky now

you are telling me that the gtx 260 wasnt priced competitively to the 4870 , the gtx 275 to the 4890 and the 250 to the 4850? £10 difference doesnt mean anything. in the real world 8 months ago nvidia was still vastly outselling ati. 6 months cant make up 3 years of great sales that put nvidia in control of 65% of the discrete cards market.

Saying 5*** is over priced at 300 when had nvidia's highest single card come in at that price?

 

[Amakuma]

Very insightful posting in this thread

The 4xxxx series was a pricing master piece, most of my friends picked up 4870's or 4850's and or put together Xfire rigs for the first time. Because the price was so good. Making the leap from 5850's is hard to justify because the price vs the 4850's at launch and post launch is so different.

 

[p0rks0da]

Very insightful posting in this thread

The 4xxxx series was a pricing master piece, most of my friends picked up 4870's or 4850's and or put together Xfire rigs for the first time. Because the price was so good. Making the leap from 5850's is hard to justify because the price vs the 4850's at launch and post launch is so different.

Yup, i won't be moving to a 5850 or 5870. Sure enough they are fast cards, with the 5850 being ~2x as fast as the 4850, but you are paying exactly double the price (or more) which means you are essentially getting the same performance per £ that you were in mid 2008.

Quite a sad state of affairs all around in the GPU market at the moment imo.

 

[drunkenmaster]

if nvidia is gone here how it goes i'll make it simple for you:
ati 4xxx series: amazing prices, ati was desperate for sales
ati 5xxx series: overpriced at launch and even more ovepriced later, ati is confident now
ati 6xxx series: vastly ovepriced like the nvidia 2xx series at launch, ati is cocky now

you are telling me that the gtx 260 wasnt priced competitively to the 4870 , the gtx 275 to the 4890 and the 250 to the 4850? £10 difference doesnt mean anything. in the real world 8 months ago nvidia was still vastly outselling ati. 6 months cant make up 3 years of great sales that put nvidia in control of 65% of the discrete cards market.

IN the real world the 260-285gtx was NOT even close to vastly outselling the 4xxx series.

Likewise the 260gtx was £300 at launch, vs the 4850 which was launched later, knowing the 260gtx price, could have easily launched and been price competitive vs the 260gtx performance, at £200, yet launched at £125, why? Do you think they priced it at UNDER HALF the priced of the 260gtx, because of competition? UNdercutting is one thing, they could have made about 3 times the profit if it was sold at £250, which would have made it price competitive with the original 260gtx, which was a little faster, and therefore should be a little more expensive.

Had the 4850 been £250 instead of £125, they'd have sold probably 1/10th of the number of cards, because theres exponentially more buyers willing to spend £125, than there is buyers willing to spend £250 and its that simple.

A ferrari is without question better than a Ford Ka, so why don't more people buy Ferrari's? Because the majority of people can't afford them, the sales of cars at £10k, is probably 50k times higher than sales of £250k cars, because thats how sales go.

The 5850 wasn't vastly overpriced at launch, the 4850 and 4870 were not close in performance, you COULD NOT buy a 4850 and get within 5% of the 4870 performance, it did not overclock to the same levels and the limited bus put it a good 15% behind at the same clocks. The 5850 is 5% behind at the same clocks, and overclocks to the same levels pretty much. Meaning at £200 you could have within 5% speed of the best cards available.

Last year, you had to buy a 4870 at £180, or you would not get close to the top end performance around.

So for similarly top levels of performance, you're around £200 in both generations. The 5870 is overpriced, but you have an option at £200 so why complain. Similarly the 5850 sales have utterly dwarfed 5870 sales, because exponentially more people can afford or are willing ot pay £200, than they are willing to pay £300.

AMD didn't raise prices, RETAILERS did, and the 5850 prices are mostly higher in the UK than anywhere else in the world. I got mine at £200, I got a 4870 around launch at £170, not a huge difference.

For the DECADE previous to this the highest end card cost £300-400 on launch, and a significantly cut down version was still £250, to pretend teh 5850 is bad value in comparison is insane, its cheaper and its limitations are almost non existant.

A 9700pro was about £280 iirc, a 9800xt was around £350 on launch, a x800xt was about £330 and a x800xl(12 pipelines rather than 16) was around £250. The trend continued, with Nvidia always priced a further £50 up with their pricing on launch.

Please try and understand also, manufacturing, TSMC have massively screwed up 40nm, the wafer itself, costs about 30% more to buy, the yields are a good 30-40% down for just AMD on 55nm, for Nvidia its even worse. Last gen $3.5k for a wafer got you 120-130 cores, this gen a $5k wafer gets you about 60-70 cores, the price per core has more than doubled for AMD and has gone up about 800% for Nvidia due to the awful yields.

The 5850 offers AMD around the exact same profit as a 4850 did.

The 55nm/4850 was just pretty much the perfect setup of core size, decent process, great yields for AMD and economy/exchange rates was at its strongest point ever. If those same cards launched now, the 4850 would have been £150 on launch and the 4870 would have been £210-220 due to lower exchange rates and worse economy.

The 5850 is not overpriced, and again, considering on launch a 5850 at £200 would utterly trounce a 285gtx being sold at £300, please explain how competition kept the 5850 prices in check in any way at all, or tell me how they are overpriced when the core costs well over double what the previous cores used to cost.

There was great production, great supply and no price gouging on the 4850/4870's, the 5850 is still available now and then at £200, EVERY single penny above that is your retailer ripping you off, a little bit distributors and its because the UK public can't help but buy at any price.

 

[Final8y]

IN the real world the 260-285gtx was NOT even close to vastly outselling the 4xxx series.

Likewise the 260gtx was £300 at launch, vs the 4850 which was launched later, knowing the 260gtx price, could have easily launched and been price competitive vs the 260gtx performance, at £200, yet launched at £125, why? Do you think they priced it at UNDER HALF the priced of the 260gtx, because of competition? UNdercutting is one thing, they could have made about 3 times the profit if it was sold at £250, which would have made it price competitive with the original 260gtx, which was a little faster, and therefore should be a little more expensive.

Had the 4850 been £250 instead of £125, they'd have sold probably 1/10th of the number of cards, because theres exponentially more buyers willing to spend £125, than there is buyers willing to spend £250 and its that simple.

A ferrari is without question better than a Ford Ka, so why don't more people buy Ferrari's? Because the majority of people can't afford them, the sales of cars at £10k, is probably 50k times higher than sales of £250k cars, because thats how sales go.

The 5850 wasn't vastly overpriced at launch, the 4850 and 4870 were not close in performance, you COULD NOT buy a 4850 and get within 5% of the 4870 performance, it did not overclock to the same levels and the limited bus put it a good 15% behind at the same clocks. The 5850 is 5% behind at the same clocks, and overclocks to the same levels pretty much. Meaning at £200 you could have within 5% speed of the best cards available.

Last year, you had to buy a 4870 at £180, or you would not get close to the top end performance around.

So for similarly top levels of performance, you're around £200 in both generations. The 5870 is overpriced, but you have an option at £200 so why complain. Similarly the 5850 sales have utterly dwarfed 5870 sales, because exponentially more people can afford or are willing ot pay £200, than they are willing to pay £300.

AMD didn't raise prices, RETAILERS did, and the 5850 prices are mostly higher in the UK than anywhere else in the world. I got mine at £200, I got a 4870 around launch at £170, not a huge difference.

For the DECADE previous to this the highest end card cost £300-400 on launch, and a significantly cut down version was still £250, to pretend teh 5850 is bad value in comparison is insane, its cheaper and its limitations are almost non existant.

A 9700pro was about £280 iirc, a 9800xt was around £350 on launch, a x800xt was about £330 and a x800xl(12 pipelines rather than 16) was around £250. The trend continued, with Nvidia always priced a further £50 up with their pricing on launch.

Please try and understand also, manufacturing, TSMC have massively screwed up 40nm, the wafer itself, costs about 30% more to buy, the yields are a good 30-40% down for just AMD on 55nm, for Nvidia its even worse. Last gen $3.5k for a wafer got you 120-130 cores, this gen a $5k wafer gets you about 60-70 cores, the price per core has more than doubled for AMD and has gone up about 800% for Nvidia due to the awful yields.

The 5850 offers AMD around the exact same profit as a 4850 did.

The 55nm/4850 was just pretty much the perfect setup of core size, decent process, great yields for AMD and economy/exchange rates was at its strongest point ever. If those same cards launched now, the 4850 would have been £150 on launch and the 4870 would have been £210-220 due to lower exchange rates and worse economy.

The 5850 is not overpriced, and again, considering on launch a 5850 at £200 would utterly trounce a 285gtx being sold at £300, please explain how competition kept the 5850 prices in check in any way at all, or tell me how they are overpriced when the core costs well over double what the previous cores used to cost.

There was great production, great supply and no price gouging on the 4850/4870's, the 5850 is still available now and then at £200, EVERY single penny above that is your retailer ripping you off, a little bit distributors and its because the UK public can't help but buy at any price.

It cant really get explained much better & clearer than that.

 

[Amakuma]

Agreed nicely put!

 

[p0rks0da]

At the end of the day ATI's problems are exactly that, their problems. I have no sympathy for any company that's trying to part me from my money. I buy based on value for money, all issues of yield, die size etc.. are not my problem. I'm yet to hear a convincing argument of why the 5850 is 2X the price of the card that it replaced.

I'm not disputing the fact that the 5850 is a fast card, but you pay for every last drop of that performance. As new generations of cards come out you expect performance to scale AHEAD of cost, not the other way around.

The 48XX series were excellent value for money, the same simply is not true of the 58XX series. Unless you think that getting exactly the same performance per £ of cards that came out 2 years ago is 'good value'. The whole market stinks.

 

[bridder]

At the end of the day ATI's problems are exactly that, their problems. I have no sympathy for any company that's trying to part me from my money. I buy based on value for money, all issues of yield, die size etc.. are not my problem. I'm yet to hear a convincing argument of why the 5850 is 2X the price of the card that it replaced.

I'm not disputing the fact that the 5850 is a fast card, but you pay for every last drop of that performance. As new generations of cards come out you expect performance to scale AHEAD of cost, not the other way around.

The 48XX series were excellent value for money, the same simply is not true of the 58XX series. Unless you think that getting exactly the same performance per £ of cards that came out 2 years ago is 'good value'. The whole market stinks.

This is a good point and to a large part I agree with you but the 4xxx series pricing was something of an aberration, it was ATi's sweet spot strategy played to perfection, the die sizes of them things were tiny in comparison to the competition and it was always ATi's plan to have a dual xx70 variant to compete against NVIDIA's high end part. Fast forward to the 5xxx series and ATi backed off from that sweet spot strategy a bit and produced a much bigger chip than expected, I do agree with you about the yield issue though, so it was a little more difficult for ATi to produce these things on a sickly 40nm process at TSMC, I don't give a flying about that but the 5xxx series do compete closer I think to their NVIDIA counterparts than the 4xxx series and I think that is why they are charged higher.

With zero competition for the last 6 months the 5xxx series from ATi is really a good place to put your money and some price gouging has gone/is going on...

J.

 

[fs123]

A 5850 is roughly twice the speed of a 4870 and if you have a look you can find a new 4870 for around £110 at current prices. The 5850 should ideally be around £190-£220.

It is frustrating that prices have crept up but hopefully they will drop since TSMC announced that they will add more producton capability a few weeks ago.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20100226020434_TSMC_Pledges_to_Double_40nm_Output_by_End_of_the_Year.html

 

[p0rks0da]

A 5850 is roughly twice the speed of a 4870 and if you have a look you can find a new 4870 for around £110 at current prices. The 5850 should ideally be around £190-£220.

Sorry but i don't agree with that, take a look through all the benchmarks here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2848/1

Just skimming over the review, i can't see anywhere that the 5850 is twice as fast as a 4870, in fact most of the time it's significantly less than that, even at very high resolution settings.

 

[OLDSKOOL]

The 5850 should ideally be around £190-£220.

Totally agree but to be fair it was released at £200 and I think Drunkenmaster has made a good point regarding the retailers hiking the price up as opposed to Ati.

 

[bridder]

Given that 5 over 4 series ATi virtually doubled up on everything I would expect the 5870 to double over the 4870, I'm not looking at reviews for this I'm simply looking at the math of it; but also ATi started hitting bandwidth constraints with their 256bit bus given the horsepower of the 5 series.

Having said that I do think £199 for midrange and £299 for highend is acceptable, if ATi had been more cautious and only upped everything by 50% for example I'm sure we would have had parity pricing with the 4 series cards, I do think they threw NVIDIA a curved ball by dropping that sweet spot strategy a bit.

It staggers me that given that NVIDIA are the world leaders in this field that they thought they could knock out a 500+ square mill chip on a process that for them that was virtually untried.

Also having read through most of this thread now I am amazed that some people think ATi will not royally make us all pay for NVIDIA's arrogance as I think the sweet spot strategy was a master stroke and it will only pay dividends for us consumers should there be an equally strong competitor, if NVIDIA do go the way of 3Dfx our wallets I am sure will all be in trouble...

J.