Or is the company preparing to launch a new dual-GPU board?

Oct 21, 2014 12:51 GMT  ·  By

This is something I've been wondering about for the past couple of days. Considering all the things that happened on the graphics card market, and the things that didn't happen – at least in the time we hoped – either possibility is likely.

Of course, what is “reasonable” is subject to personal interpretation, especially on a market segment where the relationship between supply and demand can be quite fickle at times.

I suppose it's a good thing that there are authorities making sure that there's never a true monopoly anywhere. If not for the video cards from AMD, we might not have known that (some of) NVIDIA's were overpriced.

At present, the video board market is in a sort of flux, but for once, it's all going the way we want it to.

The GeForce GTX 980 and 970 graphics cards are finally selling

The video cards, both based on the Maxwell micro-architecture, were supposed to have begun shipping weeks ago, but this didn't really turn out to be the case.

Sure, the official release happened and all, but most retailers didn't have the cards in stock. Not the originals and not the OEM versions either.

Now, though, the adapters can finally be found up for order, and for the most part, they stick to the official prices of $549 / €549 for the GTX 980 and $329 / €329 for the GTX 970.

Considering that the AMD Radeon R9 290X and co. are selling for $349 / €349 to $545 / €545, depending on performance and cooler, NVIDIA's prices are as reasonable as we could hope for. Especially since the company could have allowed OEMs and retailers to charge loads more due to strong demand (bitcoin miners are still going strong).

As promising as the Maxwell generation is, however, it's not them that made me nurse my hope of reasonable pricing schemes back to life. Instead, it was a certain beast of a card you may be familiar with.

The price of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan-Z has been cut in half

This particular video card is notorious. One might even say infamous. Having been released back in March, the dual-GK110 video card had a price of $3,000 / €3,000.

Now it's true that the adapter had very high performance specifications. However, they weren't all that different from those of the AMD Radeon R9 295 X2, which managed to match it with 4GB VRAM less, and while selling for half the price ($1,500 / €1,500).

Somehow, NVIDIA managed to keep the initial price until last week. The other day, though, I learned that the tag had finally been cut to $1,500 / €1,500, at least on some retail websites.

This can mean one of two things, or both

One possibility is that NVIDIA is finally succumbing to pressure, so to speak, and giving the GTX Titan-Z the price it was always supposed to have.

The other possibility, however, is that a dual-GPU adapter based on the Maxwell GPU architecture is approaching, either set to launch before Christmas or in time for CES 2015 in January.

Whichever the case may be, even if both possibilities are true, I'm not about to start complaining about this turn of events.