Let the games begin
The official launch of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4850 – codenamed RV770 Pro – the first product of AMD/ATI’s new generation of GPUs is not supposed to be until next week. However, we have been told that some retailers have jumped the gun.
AMD apparently wanted to make sure that the Radeon HD 4850 is available in quantity on launch day and so made SKUs available to the channel well in advance. The danger of such an approach is that it relies on everyone sticking to the launch date which, perhaps unsurprisingly, hasn’t happened.
With the cat now being out of the bag, the media is no longer constrained by the official launch date so HEXUS has published its first look at the HD 4850.
AMD has made no secret of its desire to achieve the highest HEXUS.bang4buck rating, i.e. performance per pound, for all of its SKUs, so the really interesting thing to keep an eye on will be the pricing of the HD 4850 compared to the HD 3870 and NVIDIA’s 8800GT, 8800GTX 512. NVIDIA has already announced it’s dropping the price of its 9800GTX by up to $90, so it wouldn't be surprising to see the rest follow.
This is the mid range segment that AMD has made its priority and, if future benchmarks for the HD 4850 compare favourably to NVIDIA GPUs at similar price points, it will be fascinating to see how NVIDIA responds.
We think that the current economic climate may, (to some degree) have played into AMD's hands. With many of your own customers feeling the penny pinch, we reckon that the price premium of the most extreme performing (read 'luxury') PC products being something which even less people may be willing to open up their wallets for; especially if they think that they can acquire very competitive and mostly adequate performance for approaching 50% less money
Be sure and let us know your mileage in terms of your customer interest and sales for these new AMD and NVIDIA graphics products.
