GTX 690 is a Prime Example of NVIDIA Reshaped?

[Lil' ½ Dead]

Recently, NVIDIA introduced its current king of the hill product in the form of two GK104 GPUs placed on the same board and called the part GeForce GTX 690. In the next couple of days, we will see the launch of GTX 670. We'll dig a bit deeper and see the consequences of recent strategy moves.

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When the company received first GK100, GK104 and GK107 dies, the performance of GK104 shocked the company executives. Our sources were telling us that there was a genuine surprise from CEO to PR/Marketing/Sales teams, since GeForce GTX 660 part was outperforming GTX 580 by a significant margin. The decision was made to rebrand the part into GTX 660 and 670 Ti, with GK100 taking the role of head honcho. Then, AMD came out with Radeon HD 7970, the very first part based on its Southern Islands architecture. The performance unveiled was the reason why the author of these lines got multiple calls from NVIDIA insiders asking "Does AMD have hidden cores in the die? What did they disable?" However, with Southern Islands being AMD's first compute intensive part (just like G80/Tesla and GF100/Fermi were compute milestones for NVIDIA), the company had to sacrifice some efficiency/performance for their first true GPU compute architecture.

The decision to rebrand GK107 into GTX 680/690 was made. Furthermore, the company decided to further increase the performance of the high-end die, giving birth to GK110. GK110 will debut in just three days, but this is the part that targets the HPC i.e. GPGPU community. We were told that the number of pre-orders for Kepler-based Tesla cards (Tesla 3000 Series) should exceed the overall number of Teslas shipped so far (over 150,000 units sold).

Source

[alan1476]

So these new cards , probably the 780GTX or the 790GTX will be out soon and the 690GTX will be old hat. I can't figure out where there are 150,000 people that go for that kind of highway robbery. I spent 1,000 on 2 680GTX EVGA cards (499.00 each and I was lucky to get them, they sold out immediately so I guess I am not the only sucker for graphics cards, and I only play BF3.

[Doctor_Death]

Alan, new cards will not be out until next year, but due to the $1000 each price tag, I'm passing on them. As long as people continue to pay, they are going to keep raising prices, it;s time we show them who's really in control.

[killjoyjim]

Ya it is like gas. They rise the price knowing we want & need it. We will pay fore it no matter what.

[alan1476]

Alan, new cards will not be out until next year, but due to the $1000 each price tag, I'm passing on them. As long as people continue to pay, they are going to keep raising prices, it;s time we show them who's really in control.

Stan, I couldn't agree with you more, I certainly am not going to buy them, I just got the 680s. And I mean just got them, less than 2 weeks ago. Do they really expect all these people to spend 1,000USD each on the new cards? Not me.

[Doctor_Death]

Alan, believe me, I was not to happy when I found out that I couldn't use my 680s for step up to the 690s, and I refuse to pay $2000 for two video cards. It's not that I don't have the cash, I just sold my 990X system and one of my X79 systems for $2400, it's having to draw a line somewhere, and I'm, not going to spend that kind of money on two cards.