14 DAY TRIAL // ATI, Advanced Micro Devices' graphics division, recently announced that it plans cutting the prices of its Radeon HD 4870 graphics card. According to the company, the graphics solutions will be available in at least one on-line retail store for only $199 for the 512MB graphics card. AMD previously sold its ATI Radeon HD 4850 card at the same $199 price-point. The Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics solution sold for this price becomes the top-performing performance-mainstream option on the market at this moment.
“The price of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 is dropping and we expect that the 512MB and 1GB boards should be available on Newegg today for around $199 and $239 respectively, offering an even more compelling value,” a spokesperson for ATI/AMD said.
As many of you already know, ATI is putting a lot of efforts into capturing more than 50 percent of the market segment of standalone desktop graphics solutions. Moreover, it is a common fact that ATI does slash prices for its final products as means of gaining more market share. According to the reports published by market tracker Jon Peddie Research, NVIDIA accounted for 60 percent of the graphics card shipments in the third quarter of the year with its GeForce chips, while ATI Radeon solutions only held about 40 percent of the market.
If the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB goes for $199 in a single online store, the game will hardly be changed in ATI's favor, nor will this allow the company to boost its presence on the market considerably. Even so, some other regional deals for the red team's card may also appear, especially given the fact that ATI seems decided to offer its high-performance products at discount prices in the current economic environment.
At the same time, we should also note that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 has seen several price cuts lately. Complemented by the new driver release from NVIDIA, the card has managed to outpace ATI's card on the market. Moreover, Newegg is also selling a MSI-built overclocked GeForce GTX 260 featuring 192 processing cores for only $200.