14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has essentially sprinted ahead of Advanced Micro Devices in the GPU architecture department, which means that AMD has to offset the advantage somehow. It appears that price cuts are the way forward.
Specifically, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has decided to shear the price tags of the Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 graphics adapters a little bit.
Previously, the Radeon R9 290 sold for around $399 in the united States of America and €399 in Europe, no matter what exchange rates would have you believe.
Well, that's not totally accurate. The boards tend to be listed for up to a hundred dollars / euro more than the MSRP.
Regardless, AMD has reduced the price for that card from $399 / €399 to $299 / €299. That's a third of the full price gone. Meanwhile, the Radeon R9 290X has gone from $549 / €549 to $399 / €399.
The Radeon R9 280X has also supposedly dropped in price, to around $269 / €269, with the R9 285 going to $229 / €229.
Unfortunately, retailers don't seem to be letting those two boards go for less than $250 - $270 / €250 - €270 yet.
The timing of this is odd
You might think that there couldn't be a more appropriate time for this price cut to occur. However, there is one thing you might not have taken into account: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980/970 shortage.
Though “shortage” might not be a strong enough word. There literally are very few, if any, cards in stock, at least in the US.
AMD could have probably gotten away with another two or four weeks of the Radeon R9 series boards selling for the same sums as before, and only then apply the price cuts.
Especially since the new NVIDIA Maxwell-based GPU had to stick to the same 28nm technology as the previous generation, so the new GPUs aren't as powerful as they could have been.
Then again, consumers are not entirely blameless in the shortage of NVIDIA boards, since they appear to have ordered them quite avidly during the past three weeks, so AMD needed a way to recapture potential customer interest.
Besides, with NVIDIA video cards unavailable, lower prices might be the perfect incentive to get people to buy AMD cards instead. Right now.
Not all retailers have applied the price cuts yet
Newegg should have already updated its AMD Radeon R9 290/290X offers, but other online stores are taking it more slowly. Needless to say, custom-cooled and overclocked versions continue to be more expensive than the rest.