14 DAY TRIAL // With the release of the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics adapters, NVIDIA finally put an end (or is about to, since the cards won't ship until April 12) to AMD's monopoly on the DirectX 11 graphics market segment. With this, the latter was expected to take countermeasures against its rival, with possibilities including price cuts or more and newer card releases. Now that the allotted time is finally upon us, however, the Sunnyvale, California-based company seems apathetic instead of worried or excited, as no sort of response appears to be in the works.
When the Fermy-based dynamic duo made their official paper launch, the folks over at Tom's Hardware contacted AMD and found out that the CPU and GPU maker wasn't really worried. This attitude comes because of several factors.
On the one hand, even though the GTX 480 reclaimed the crown of fastest single-GPU adapter on the market, it has a high TDP, an equally high operational temperature and a price that is less user friendly that that of the Radeon HD 5870. The second reason why ATI put on the apathetic face was because it still had the most powerful graphics card, albeit dual-GPU, namely the HD 5970, which is only slightly more expensive than the single-GPU GTX 480.
More recently, Fudzilla has reported that the company's position hasn't changed. One reason why ATI is taking its time is, most likely, the fact that Fermi hasn't even started selling yet, with NVIDIA set to wait until April 12 before making its move. The latter also won't be able to come up with a dual-Fermi card in the near future, which means that AMD, and its partners, will still have time to ravage the enthusiast market with their various upcoming 2GB and 4GB HD 5870 and HD 5970 models.
Whether ATI is going to take serious measures to defend its position will probably depend on whether or not NVIDIA manages to reach desired GTX 400 inventory levels before May.