The Graphics Wars: AMD Axes Radeon HD 3000 Prices

AMD is reportedly preparing to cut down prices for the Radeon HD 3000-series with the advent of Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT graphics card. Worldwide retailers claim that the graphics card manufacturer is pushing another price drop below the previous estimations released a few weeks ago.

The price slash seems to be closely related to Nvidia having released its first card in the next generation GeForce 9 series, and AMD's manufacturing partners claim that the new price tags for the HD 3000 will vary between $170 and $190. This is the second price drop for the series, as the company previously cut down pricing on the HD 3870 model, that used to sell for $249 (currently available for $189). The Radeon HD 3850 model also went under the ax, and pricing was lowered $30 to $169.

Nvidia's GeForce 9600GT model arrived ready for the battle on the graphics market, and managed to achieve impressive scores in benchmarks, and many independent PC game testers claim that it can even surpass Advanced Micro Devices' Radeon HD 3870 offering. Nvidia also applied a strict pricing policy, and slashed pricing of the cards selling through its retail outlets. For instance, NewEgg dropped the retail price for the GeForce 9600GT cards from the originally estimated $169-$189, down to a more competitive $150.

AMD is currently planning to launch a Radeon HD 3830 graphics chip to cover the mid-range market. According to AMD's manufacturing partners, the new chip will come with an 128-bit memory interface, 320 stream processing units, 16 texture filtering units and 16 ROPs, and will support memory capacities up to 256MB.

The new offering will target a specific sector of the graphics market, namely the "gap" between Nvidia's GeForce 9600GT and 8600GTS models. It will also be competitively priced and is expected to arrive in May at about $129.

However, if the Radeon HD 3830 does not meet the market's expectations, the company will have to order another price drop on the Radeon HD 3870, 3850 and 3830 versions, in order to get additional market share.