Nvidia Considering Price Cuts for Maxwell 2.0 Graphic Cards including the Geforce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980 and GTX 970

Usman Pirzada

Nvidia is considering updating the pricing of its Maxwell 2.0 lineup after the Raden Fury X launch a few days ago. The decision to mull over price and product positioning of this market segment is to make sure that the majority market share, that Nvidia currently has, is retained. AMD introduced its flagship model, the Radeon R9 Fury X at the $649 price point - the same MSRP of the Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 Ti.

Nvidia considering price wars with high end graphic cards: GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980 and GTX 970

AMD started loosing market share to Nvidia at a considerably steep rate sometime in 2014 and has been trying to win it back ever since. There is no clear winner with the GTX 980 Ti and Fury X trading blows in gaming benchmarks, with perhaps the slight edge going to the 980 Ti. Pricing can however make all the difference in consumer opinion. There are fans that will buy their favorite company no matter what but a major share of customers will simply go for the best performing card at a reasonable price, in other words, value. Nvidia did not use any bleeding edge technology such as HBM in their GTX 980 Ti and the GM200 die taped out a long time ago so they can afford to cut the MSRP a little bit further.

AMD on the other hand not only created a very large die (with correspondingly lower yields) and used HBM on top. I am not sure what kind of margins they are operating in for this particular GPU but I am sure it won't be alot. If Nvidia decreases the pricing of the GTX 980 Ti, AMD might not be able to answer in a tit for tat maneuver. If they do, a pricing war will ensue - and you know who wins in a pricing war: the consumer.

The US market already has very competitive pricing but the EU region is absolutely bonkers. They have markets where you will find a 980 Ti and Fury X at over the 1000 (US) dollar mark. In an attempt to target this European segment and bring the prices down close to the US MSRP, Nvidia could lower the numbers a bit. AMD could respond by lowering the pricing of its Hawaii and Tonga GPUs further, or even Fury. Needless to say, if green decides to make this move, things could get very very interesting for the average gamer. Not to mention it will be time to get our wallets out and buy insanely powerful graphic adapters at relatively cheap pricing.

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