It is only 2 months late

Check your calendar..... 7970 released on December of last year.

Because other manufactures set your release dates? Moron.

HD7970 wasn't on sale until January 9.
HD7950 wasn't on sale until January 31.

$499 GTX680 is on average 30-35% faster than a $449 HD7950, has a quieter coooler and consumes less power than an overlcocked HD7970 while still beating it on air and costing less!

Cause theres no way ATI is just milking the $550 price while it lasts, Im sure 3 years from now it will sitll be $550. /sarcasm

Theyll probably drop the price of the 7970 to $480 in 2 weeks or whenever the keplers are stably on the shelf and not sold out. At $480 vs $500 for the nvidia it will still probably be a slight better deal to buy the nvidia, but it will be a fairly close price per performance ratio at that point.

"At $480 vs $500 for the nvidia it will still probably be a slight better deal to buy the nvidia."

Slightly better deal? Not sure if serious.

At HardOCP, it was up to 40% faster HD7970 in Batman with 8AA, between 33-208% faster in SKYRIM, 16% faster in BF3! All while consuming less power and having a quieter cooler.

Those are some huge wins before considering all the new features that HD7900 doesn't have.

HD6970 didn't trail like this to GTX580 and it cost just $369. So no way in the world does an HD7970 at $480 make any sense when it's losing this badly. $429-449 for HD7970 sounds reasonable, but only because it has massive overclocking headroom. Otherwise, it should be more like $369-399.

Here is the HardOCP review:
http://hardocp.com/articl...x_680_video_card_review/1

Fair enough assessment on where you think the price should / will go.

When you remove the ridicously 1 sided benchmarks (outliers), and focus on 2560x1600, I'd say there is about a 10% advantage for the nvidia card at stock clocks, and only a 5% advantage when overclocked. (just based on guessing while looking at the performance summary, though i did read the whole article), at 450 vs 500 the cards would be 100% equal price per performance, at $460 i think they can get people who lean towards ATI, (In other words youve swayed me from 480 to 460 as being what they might go down to.)

I think the cards being this close is great for competition, as the prices right now are pretty ridiculous. Hopefully when the dual gpu cards show up well finally see these priced where i think the best gaming cards should be ~ 350.

I think it's even worse than it seems. Both AMD and NV are taking us for a ride this round.

There are plenty of rumors of why GTX680 is really just a GTX670Ti that was renamed to GTX680 at the last minute:

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/12-03-22/241b.jpg

and

http://www.techpowerup.co...s/showthread.php?t=162901

- 256-bit 192GB/sec memory bandwidth
- Only 294mm^2 die vs. the usual 500mm^2+
- Double precision performance 1/24th of SP (!!) (This doesn't matter for us gamers but this isn't characteristic of the flagship chip in NV's consumer lineup)
- 2GB of VRAM instead of 3-4GB

The way the SMX clusters are setup with 192 SPs is similar to GF114. GF104 codename is a logical codename evolution of that chip.

So $499 for an upper end mid-range Kepler chip only looks like a great deal because HD7970 is not fast. Do you remember the last time NV released a next generation high-end card that was only 35% faster than its previous flagship (i.e., GTX580)? Seems unimpressive even for them.

Thank you.
It's not sad to see amd fans having lost everything they preached for years and more with a new set of lacking features added to the old missing set amd suffered little for due to their fans denials and misplaced blame. Add in the lower price for Nvidia's better card and you have the amd fan machinations spinning out of control more than usual if that were possible.
Beaten severely at their own talking points game including price must be extremely painful, and I am so happy and delirious to witness it.
I don't mind being a fan of anything, but one I respect doesn't need lies, spin, and crazy contradictions and massive blind spots to support their fan favorite.
I would appreciate amd fans much more if they just admitted defeat then told us they are glad to pay $80 more (no buying the cheapest at $50 more) for the amd card because it has represented everything they've us told they believe in for a card and a company the past number of years.
Sadly for amd, I have not seen this happen a single time. I haven't seen a single one uphold their claimed virtues in another fashion and switch to the Nvidia card because it has delivered what they have been preaching about for so long.
I trust all of them even less now, and they've absolutely and undeniably earned it.

LOL " In this graph we have 8X MSAA turned on in the game plus NVIDIA's 8X TR SSAA and AMD's Adaptive SSAA. This graph just blows our minds, something is severely bottlenecking the Radeon HD 7970 and we don't know what. The Radeon HD 7970 has 3GB of RAM and a very high memory bandwidth compared to the GTX 680. Yet, the GTX 680 is 208% faster!

Whatever the cause is, its clear the GTX 680 allows a better experience right now by allowing 8X MSAA + 8X TR SSAA to be enabled in this game and deliver above 60 FPS average performance with phenomenal image quality."
http://hardocp.com/articl...x_680_video_card_review/6

In this graph we have 4X MSAA turned on in the game, and then we turned on 4X TR SSAA from the NVIDIA control panel and Adaptive SSAA from the AMD control panel. This is as close to the same Transparency Supersampling AA samples we can get to compare.

The GeForce GTX 680 just blows the Radeon HD 7970 away in Transparency AA performance. The GTX 680 is 94% faster than the Radeon HD 7970, and both are producing similar visual quality at these settings! This is amazing, and not what we expected.

---
Same old story, amd can't hang

Proof that it is 30-35% faster? According from benchmarks and actual testing with my own cards, the difference is either 1-3FPS, or AMD wins. Both nonoverclocked, the GTX 680 doesn't OC as well as the 7950 and 7970 too, so whenever it is a battle between two overclocked cards AMD wins every single time.

Did you even look at the charts?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/i...gtx-680/21_oc1980_big.png

That's not at all what NV said.
http://cdn.techiser.com/w...-Q4-2011-28nm-614x460.jpg

"3-4x the Double-Precision GFlops performance/watt from Fermi."

Let's not make up information out of thin air and pass it on as fact.

making up things out of thin air?

Nvidia Hints That Kepler is 3x Faster Than Fermi

http://www.tomshardware.c...n-kepler-fermi,14966.html

from your Tom's link, and you should know sensationalized headlines are not truths but sensations exaggerated for effect, and you bit hard...
" It was unclear which Kepler chip was used "
Hence we can say the giant supercore not yet out is 3x near faster, if we must, can't we...

overclocked really well? i saw like 10 to 15% that's mediocre at best.

the hd7970 can reach 25% easily.

and the gk110 will have the same problems all of nvidia's big GPU's have had. too big, too power hungry, too expensive, outperformed and out-priced by dual-gpu solutions.

and what do you mean with maxed out? there is no reason why AMD couldn't make a much larger version of the hd7970s chip. they just dont want too for the reason i just laid out.
btw, be the time the gk110 come out... the hd8xxx series will be around the corner.

this is the first time in a while that nvidia is competitive again in terms of performance per transistor and performance per watt. so I'll give them that, even if they did have to cut back on GPGPU performance to do it.

What a stupid argument. So AMD shipped an insanely factory underclocked 925mhz card and you are claiming it's a better overclocker? No...really? So if Intel was selling you a 4.5ghz factory clocked 2500K, you'd rather get a 3.3ghz 2500K and manually overclock it for fun? It would have been 100x better if HD7970 actually shipped with 1050 clocks out of the box so we wouldn't have to sit there and waste our time overclocking it just to match a stock GTX680.

The whole point of a premium card is to get premium performance out of the box. Whatever else you net with overclocking is a nice bonus. In HD7970's case, it practically needed to be overclocked to 1100mhz+ to make it impressive; and it is at those speeds.

Ok genius, what would you rather take a $50 cheaper card that beats a factory preoverclocked 1050mhz HD7970s or play the lottery trying to find a 1% bin of HD7970s that can do 1250mhz on air?

Also, last time I checked most aftermarket cooled HD7970s are > $550. So your advice is to pay more $, to buy a card that consumes more power at stock load and at load in overclocked states, that needs overvolting of 1.25-1.3V to get to 1250mhz to convincingly beat a reference overclocked 680? Also, a card that has none of the cool features such as TXAA, Advaptive Vsync, native AO in the drivers, etc. You don't sound at all like an enthusiast that welcome new hardware and features that makes older hardware obsolete. Most of us would want GTX680 to beat HD7970 by as much as possible and then HD8790 to beat GTX680 by as much as possible.

Here we have Nvidia bringing out a much better single-GPU card that makes AMD's current products look overpriced, it brings a bunch of cool new features, factory GPU boost for everyone, cards hitting 1200mhz on air with GPU boost, and you are trying to defend HD7970 as a better card and GTX680 not worth? LOL.

And honestly, AMD users now using GPGPU compute performance as some *key* advantage are really hypocritical about GPGPU performance. Nvidia had that in spades since G80 for 3 generations while HD4870/4890/5870/6970 were horrible in compute (but were excellent gaming chips). That didn't stop many of us from picking up Evergreen, Cayman and Cypress series because they were leading in performance/$ and performance/watt. So honestly, don't even go there with GPGPU as an advantage before you look even more biased.

Were were all of your people's voices for all of those generations when NV was laying the smack down in GPGPU compute, and especially so in the last 2 years with Fermi? Oh right, it didn't count because AMD's cards were a no-show in compute or Tessellation.

I remember, the AMD fanboys were shouting how hot and power hungry of a chip GTX480 was while conveniently ignoring the GPGPU performance advantage it had. Now the higher power consumption and slower performance of HD7970 is justified because it has GPGPU compute advantage? Grasping for straws much? What an inconsistent viewpoint on things.

GK104 was never meant to be a GPGPU card since most gamers don't care for those features. It was built as a gaming card from the ground-up. Actually most people who care for GPGPU compute wouldn't use HD7970 anyway due to lack of real world support/apps. For people who actually need computational performance in professional, financial and scientific applications buy Quadro cards. People who do distributed computing projects also buy NVidia cards (i.e. Folding@Home). No one cares about GPGPU compute in some artificial Civ5 or other nonsense synthetic SiSoftware Sandra DP benches.

I love people using worthless synthetic GPGPU benchmarks to try to claim superiority of HD7970 in compute but in real world tasks such as encoding video via CUDA, running professional, financial or scientific applications, the professionals are using Quadro cards. Nvidia has > 90% market share in that space for a reason - class leading performance and software support.

It's sad that so many AMD fanboys give the rest of us AMD users such a bad image with their incoherent and illogical arguments.

Us as in your a AMD user yourself? then why are you so hard on them all the time? Obviously you like certain aspects of AMD products over the competition to insinuate you spent money on their offerings. So ..... where are your pro AMD comments then cause I do not see any.

I agree with BestJinjo 100%. Nvidia has released a superior card here to the 7970 and it isn't even their flagship product yet. I just get thumbed down by rabid AMD fanboys who can't read the evidence right in front of their face.

This is coming from someone who is currently using an ATI 5850 in my gaming rig. It was nothing but a disappointment in terms of overclocking, heat, driver support, and performance. Should have bought a GTX 460. Wont be making that mistake again.

I am saying I bought HD6970s in CF because they were better bang for the buck than 2x GTX580s in my mind ($370x 2 vs. $500x2). It was great that AMD gave me a dedicated gaming chip without GPGPU compute features I didn't use. I knew that GTX580 was better in compute. If someone needed those features I'd recommend them a $350 GTX570 for example.

How come so many AMD users are only now touting compute performance as a key advantage? I bet they also purchased the awesome HD4870, HD4890, HD5850, 5870, HD6950, HD6970 cards in the past. If compute performance was so important to them, they would have been running NV's cards since 8800GTX. That's my point. So there isn't a lot of sense in trying to defend AMD here.

I actually saw much of the same when HD5870 was losing in Tessellation heavy benchmarks (Crysis 2, Lost Planet 2). When HD7970 launched and beat GTX580, suddenly Tessellation became important. Again, another inconsistency on AMD user's part that I find rather odd.

Now GTX680 beats HD7970 by 40% at 1080P in Batman AC with Tessellation.
http://hardocp.com/articl...x_680_video_card_review/4

Again, isn't that better for us gamers? 2.5 months after HD7970 launched, we can buy a $500 card that's faster than a $550 card when key DX11 features are enabled.

I wasn't defending GTX580 when that card consumed more power, cost more $ than HD6970 because it had GPGPU features only to turn around today and start defending HD7970 vs. GTX680 because HD7970 is a better compute card but a worse gaming card.

It seems this time GTX680 is more efficient for gaming. GTX680 is a dedicated gaming chip just like my HD6970 cards are. It also costs less than the 7970, has a quieter cooler and consumes less power.

HD7970 this round is like GTX580 last round in that it has plenty of GPGPU compute, consumes more power, but now it's actually slower and costs more. Why would I be defending AMD in that case? It seems NV now offers everything that made HD4800/5800/6900 series great - higher efficiency, lower price, more features and this time actually faster performance.

Either way, I think if this puts downward pricing pressure on AMD, that's also a great outcome because of GTX680.

Check again, if you look at 7970 the die size it is really conservative, and seeing that it can overclock by 30-50% suggests there is room for a better model. Meanwhile, GTX 680 does not outperform a stock clocked 7970, let alone an overclocked 7970, if you were to look at the performance charts, 7970 won in a huge fraction of games with significant lead over 680, even with 680 overclocked.

Even my 7950 with a 50% overclock has higher FPS rofl.

Proof is in the chart on this website:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/i...gtx-680/21_oc1980_big.png

HD7970 has a die size from 352m^2 to 365mm^2 depending on the source. GTX680 has a die size of 294mm^2.

HD7970 still loses despite a 20-24% large die size and 70GB/sec more memory bandwidth. Still, gamers don't really care for die sizes. Die sizes simply help engineers to focus on efficiency.

Regardless, if you want to use your die size argument, then if a 294mm^2 chip just beat a 365mm^2 7970, once 500mm^2 Kepler ships, AMD will be in serious trouble.

You can't overclock HD7970 by 50% on air BTW. Most max out at 1250mhz (35%) on air, with majority failing to reach 1200mhz. An 1150mhz HD7970 just lost by up 1-11% in this review to a reference overlcocked GTX680. That means it takes a 1200mhz+ HD7970 just to match that level of performance, with higher power consumption and $50-100 more expensive! And what happens when GTX680 is released using aftermarket 680s such as Direct CUII, MSI TwinFrozr and Gigabyte cards? HD7970 needs a price cut, immediately.

Also, HD7950 needs a 1200mhz overclock just to match a stock GTX680. Ya, let's save $40 to play the overclocking lottery or get a card that beats it by 30% out of the box. Good luck with selling that.

The 7970 would perhaps be an attractive option vs the 680 if it costs $450. I suspect we'll see a price cut to $499 and $20 rebates here and there and everyone who was the first on the 7000 series boat gets egg on their face.

Now that I've been called NV biased, I don't know if I should put a 2nd flame-suit on but here it goes:

Even though I'd recommend a $499 GTX680 over HD7950 or HD7970 right now, I still think buying a GTX680 is also kinda putting an egg on your face. That's because in my eyes GTX680 is more akin to 670Ti that should probably be $399. I think the constraints at TSMC, expensive 28nm wafers, poor yields that are normally associated with transition to a new node aren't allowing AMD and NV to be as aggressive with pricing as last generation.

I think GTX685 is the missing $500-550 card that's not here because of w/e power / yield or other issues NV is having. So while it seems great vs. 7900 series, it still feels odd to pay $500 for a 256-bit chip that's just 294mm^2 when it probably is a natural successor to GF114, not GF110.

You know?

Yes it's usually not a good idea to buy any product at launch unless you need it or have money to burn. And, let's be honest, the only people buying 7000 series chips up until now just wanted bragging rights.

I'm going to wait and see what happens when the GK110 gets released. I suspect NV is thinking right now they'll get $650+ for it but maybe AMD lowering their prices will make the 685 come out for $550 and the 680 drop top $450.

Wow, that's hilarious your post got downrated by 5 rabid AMD fanboys.

- $50 more than HD7950 for 30-35% more performance
- $50-100 less than any pre-factory overclocked HD7970 on the market that has any chance of equal performance
- Quieter reference blower than AMD's reference blower
- Beats HD7970 on air cooling at lower volts and power consumption in overclocked states.
- Active Vsync
- TXAA
- PhysX, CUDA
- 3D Surround gaming off 1 card
- 300 games support for 3D surround
- Native Ambient Occlusion in the drivers

Wow, so much damage control around.

HD7900 falling in price would be great for everyone. I know I'd ditch my 6970s in CF for 2 of those once they hit $399. Not sure why AMD fanboys are so upset. Insane. GTX680 makes HD7950 worthless and HD7970 needs a $50-100 price cut. That's a win-win for us consumers.

Wow dude your like so in bed with Nvidia, calm down AMD will counter and you will be crying again

You have no idea what you are talking about at all. I am actually running AMD cards. Why would I be crying if AMD beats GTX680? I would want that!

I am a hardware enthusiast. I want fastest cards all the time. I want more competition. I want price drops for consumers. I don't sit there defending HD7970 or its $550 price tag when it's no longer worth buying at $550. Who is the fanboy here exactly? People waiving $450 HD7950 as reasonable purchases against a $499 GTX680 or using unrealistic "guaranteed" 1200mhz overclocks that a handful of cards get on air to support their view that HD7970 is better?

The fanboys are people trying to scour the Internetz finding 1-3 benchmarks where HD7970 wins. Everyone else sees it how it is -- GTX680 is superior, it's time for AMD to lower prices and work on a more refined HD7970 to improve its efficiency to hopefully Pitcairn's levels.

I don't know about you but if HD7980 gave GPU Boost, 10-15% more performance, Active Vsync, etc, then I'd get that over the 680. That's cuz I am not a fanboy unlike some people here.

Again where are your pro AMD comments then. You claim you are a hardware enthusiast yet you don't stand behind your purchasing decisions? That makes no sense. All I see is your pro Nvidia rhetoric. Prove me wrong

"You claim you are a hardware enthusiast yet you don't stand behind your purchasing decisions?"

Just because you purchased one companies product once doesn't mean you're admitting defeat by purchasing a different companies product in the future. That's what separates fanboys from enthusiasts.

I agree, yet he never gives any positive evidence to why he liked his AMD purchase other than it was cheaper at the time. Which leads me to believe it was a last resort purchase on his part.

Fanboyism is a state of mind that is not always congruent with purchasing actions. You can do one thing and think something completely different. No one is completely devoid of bias thus a true enthusiast mindset can never really happen by your definition. And along the same vane we are all fanboys

I still am not understanding what you want me to prove. What "pro-AMD" comments would you like? I am not Pro-AMD or Pro-NV. I am pro performance/$, features and efficiency for gaming. So I look at it on a card by card basis. For example:

If you ask me if I think HD7870 is a better card than GTX580 at $350, I would say most definitely. HD7870 overclocks to surpass GTX580 speeds while consuming 100W less, has 4K display support, natively supports at least 4 displays vs. 2 on 580 (except for special Galaxy version of the 580) has 2GB of VRAM that helps with texture mods in games such as SKYRIM vs. 1.5GB for most 580s, etc.

HD6870 is the best bang for the buck budget gaming card right now, etc. I could go on and on. That's not me being "Pro-AMD" but that's because I think HD7870 is a better card than GTX580 is or that HD6870 is a better card than GTX560 or HD7770 are. I don't think 7900 series are better than GTX680, not at their current prices. So instead of calling me "Pro-NV", I am rather Pro GTX680 at the moment because it's simply better.

I don't understand why I have to pick sides. This is what's supposed to happen - newer cards are supposed to be better. We don't want another FX5800 Ultra disaster.

Very, very well-said, BestJingo!

If you are a enthusiast as you say. Show me where you were building up the 7970 as the "best card money can buy" before the gtx680 came out. If you are truly brand agnostic it would make sense you would weight in on how good the 7970 is and how it was the best card out there until the 680 came out.

I would be willing to bet you bemoaned the price of the 7970 and instead exclaimed it would be better to wait till the 680 came out. Yet again showing your nvidia favoritism even though at the time the best card to get was the 7970

You can choose to not choose sides if you want. But your deluding yourself if you think most of your comments are not pro nvidia.

You can't have it all, it seems.

1)Gaming performance
2)GPGPU performance
3)Reasonable power consumption.

Kepler kinda sacrifices on 2 to get 1 & 3. Fermi had 1 and 2, but not really 3. GCN Radeons are jacks of all trades. VLIW Radeons are like Kepler, but more extreme in sucking @2.

Except real world support for GPGPU computing on AMD products is pretty much nil. A race car driver (experts) with a Camry (less GPGPU cores) will do better than a 16 year old (AMD) with a Ferrari (more GPGPU cores).

Partially true. GTX680 is not the hgih-end Kepler chip though. Right now it looks like the gap is smaller because Nvidia just took a GTX560Ti successor and pitted it against HD7970. No wonder NV said GCN was not impressive. Here they are selling what would have been a $350 card for $500 because HD7970 is not that fast.

There isnt any reliable info out on the gk110, it could be that adding back in the gpgpu performance, and going to a higher bit rate memory bus will take up a lot of the power headroom available on the gk104. I have a feeling hte gtx685, or whatever it will be called will just be 10% faster for games, but around 20-30% more power used. Of course thats just speculation. And im pleasantly surprised that Nvidia realized we dont all need gpgpu computing on the ethusiast parts, save that crap for the business customers.

But the reports are 80% faster, not 10% - some reports stretch it to 100% faster.
Since those of us who pay attention have seen these things the same time that GK104 reports were being denied by amd fans, it's plenty easy to make fairly accurate predictions.
50%+ faster is plenty reasonable.

So it's a nice thing that we're not seeing faster graphics cards than GTX 680?

I think I'd like to see technology progress faster rather than slower.

HD7950 was a great buy at $460, especially if you got the dual-fan Sapphire version. Now, it needs to drop to $399 to make sense though.

GTX 680 overclocks higher than HD 7970. Many reviews show it reaching around 1250MHz, while many reviews show the 7970 to reach only 1125 MHz.

2 months is not late for an overall 7% performance increase over HD 7970. Since GTX 680 is already beating HD 7970 while consuming less energy, being quieter, using less transistors on smaller silicon, using a smaller card that only needs 2x 6-pin power connectors, etc.. I'd place my bets on NV dominating the rest of the 28nm match.

Nvidia has always come out as the clear overall victor on each node match. Just because AMD won the first round does not mean that AMD won the boxing match (40nm match). Let's say that AMD won the first 3 rounds out of 12 rounds, but NV dominated for the next 9 rounds. Now, it looks like AMD is only winning the first round, out of twelve 28nm rounds.

Your evidence is unfortunately lacking in numbers. Only four linked sites in no way represent an average of more than 30 reviews already out there on the internet. For example, I could say that this review: http://www.eteknix.com/re...ler-graphics-card-review/
is evidence that GTX 680 destroys HD 7970 at 5760x1080.

NVIDIA MHz != AMD MHz. It is about the percentage of overclock it can get beyond stock, 30+% is no laughing matter when NVIDIA can only get half that.

The MHz being equal is not the point at all.

First, HD 7970 needs to be at least 1000MHz in order to match GTX 680 that averages at 1050MHz (depending on the boost, which actually hovers close to 1090MHz most of the time).

That's for overall performance in a wide range suite of games, covering 1080p to 3x1080p resolutions.

HD 7970 + 10% = GTX 680 stock

An average HD 7970 can overclock by 20% at most. 30% is highly unlikely.

An average GTX 680 can overclock by 10-15% for 100% stability in all games, and the 10% is a very modest observation after scouring dozens of reviews and forums on the internet.

Therefore, GTX 680 still ends up 5% faster than the $50 more expensive HD 7970 when both cards are overclocked.

Kepler is Nvidia's first new architecture in more than 5 years, so some nice driver improvements would not be too surprising, even if quite frequent or massive.

Why weren't you taking clocks into account when comparing 570 or 580 GTX against HD 6970? Also, for a clock 4 clock comparison you should lower the frequency of 7970 to 4000 MHz (vs 5500 stock).
As you can see in this review, even 580 GTX at 910 clock is about equal to 7970 (and with a lower memory clock), a proof of what a great card the 580 GTX was (and still is).
http://www.xbitlabs.com/a...deon-hd-7970_9.html#sect0

The 680 overclocks to 1,275 out of the box.
The 7970 oveclocks to perhaps 1,200 with luck.
925 is about 75 less than 1006
1200 is about 75 less than 1275
---
Nvidia has released the last prior 3 flagships at EXACTLY $499.
this one has also been released at exactly $499
---
that 4 times in a row, same price....
---
I am sick of hearing Nvidia dropped the price.
AMD knew long ago what NV flagship would cost.

Really people, you can't compare clock frequency between two different architectures.

Yeah, and Baumann himself said that AMD's priority was to get the 7970 out of the gate as quickly as possible just to enjoy a head-start once again on a new fab process node.

It's commendable, as it encourages Nvidia to work harder to push their technology also.

It's like getting a solid first punch in a boxing match, stunning the opponent for the rest of the first round. Everybody gets so excited and emotional, but then the opponent laughs it off and gives him a good beating for the rest of the boxing match. Contending for the underdog is fun and exciting, but the victor takes the prize home.

We can look at Baumann's statement from other angle.
AMD knew that 7970 has no chances even versus mid range GTX 680 (aka GTX 670 Ti). If AMD had launched 7970 after 680, AMD'd have had very bleak outlook.
And prices of 7970 should had been much lower from the start.

I suspect NV has split its GPU products into two path: game-oriented and GPGPU/professional-oriented (for HPC etc). Not bad idea. At least from now on professionals will know what they pay higher prices for.

Right, an excellent plan, near paper launch your slower flagship at a hugely inflated price and your base, rabid price/perf/power freaks will buy it up at any price willing to discount forever anything Nvidia said and anything after the Nvidia winning card launches.
Why not severely overcharge the amd fanboys ? Make them pay, and afterwards they will stil argue with every lie available to them the price is justified and it's all Nvidia's fault.
I hope they raise the price on the 7970 $50.
If they do, the amd fanboys will claim they won and that there is a giant driver fix coming that takes advantage of compute...
LOL
It's perfect - amd has a rabid fanboy base so they need to take big advantage of them.

""Last night, AMD told us that they intend to launch a GHz Edition of the Radeon HD 7970, without specifying exactly what it would be."

Ghz is 1,000.... not 1,300.

Zotac is releasing a 2GHZ GTX680...
I guess the grinnin and connin by amd boys does need to stop...
http://www.techpowerup.co...GHz-Core-Clock-Speed.html

Or they are the most biased, and the other sites were fair.