PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Chip makers Nvidia and AMD are preparing to do battle in the graphics card arena once again.
The industry is expecting AMD to reveal a new line of GPUs in the coming months – potentially Radeon 300 cards – to compete with the popular Nvidia GeForce 900 Series. These launched late last year and sold strongly, prompting sellers to drop the price of AMD’s R7 and R9 cards.
However, PCR understands there’s also more to come from Nvidia, with a potential announcement due at the Computex tech trade show on June 2nd to 6th.
Chillblast sales director Ben Miles tells PCR what he’d like to see from the new cards: “It definitely wasn’t enough for AMD to drop the pricing. AMD has been saying it’s changing from a modular GPU design to a monolithic design for the new range of cards. It’s an architectural departure and we’ll just have to see whether what they’ve done is enough to take the fight [to Nvidia].
“It’s fair to say on the performance standpoint they’re not that far off the pace, but their cards are very power hungry. So I think they’ve taken that architecture as far as they can, and just making ever larger more complex GPUs with extra modules on them is not going to win the fight against Nvidia at the moment.
“I think Nvidia has kind of done the hard work already and won’t need to bring out anything revolutionary. What we’ll see will be just enough to rain on AMD’s parade.
"I think they will drop the price of the 980 to be more aggressive, maybe to £299, and will introduce a new top end SKU between the 980 and the Titan, like a £450 Ti, which will effectively go up against the new AMD Radeon R9 390 or R10 390, or whatever AMD decides to call it.”
Guv Khan from Eclipse Computers added: “I think AMD has some great technology but I feel they’re struggling to drive that message to the end user. When you compare features and benefits such as FreeSync, AMD do what they are good at and add value to their products. I find Nvidia customers are very loyal to the brand and this is where AMD struggle.
“Furthermore, with Intel ruling in the CPU sector, this also makes life difficult for AMD as a VGA provider.
“[With regards to new GPUs] there are talks already about the next generation of AMD cards – and Computex would be a great event to announce these.”
