Before you continue reading, know this: all I'm doing is writing about my own personal opinions about what AMD and nVidia should do. I've seen the market and specs and benchmarks for years, so I have a pretty good understand of what's going on.
Next, I'm not a professional tech journalist; I *will* make grammatical mistakes here and there, my English isn't perfect, I'm not trying to write seriously or professionally, and I may be waayyy off. And I may be slightly biased in some areas, but I try to give as many pros and cons as possible for both sides, and I'll give you my own two cents (for whatever it's worths - on a side note, my two cents is worth exactly 0.02$ USD) and I'll let you make your own opinion for yourself (because I haven't figured out how to get my remote control to work on other people's brains yet - go figure...)
Now, let's start with some background information:
https://teksyndicate.com/users/rsilverblood/blog/2013/10/30/gpu-wars-nvidias-sneaky-play-gtx-780-ghz-edition
Read it, check the links there, and don't bug me if I don't include links for everything. (I'm writing this at 4AM local time after I drove my bike 7 miles in the rain back home, for a part-time job for minimum wage, on a horrible single-core Pentium laptop with integrated graphics until I can afford to replace some parts for my old refurbished OEM desktop. Sorry for the rant, just don't ask me for links.)
nVidia and AMD have been competing in the price/performance market for some time. As Zoltan nicely points out, nVidia limits what their partners can do with their chips, while AMD leaves it open.
nVidia's philosophy is "closed everything - we control it, not our partners or our customers, we sell what we want and you buy it or you don't" -- AMD's philosophy is "everything is open -- our partners can make limits or improve upon it, and they determine price and limitations, and you as the consumer make the choice you want"
AMD has recently had better raw performance in many areas, even though their cards consume more energy and may be louder, but they cost less (usually). nVidia however has now become "like Apple, except they sell graphics cards"; well engineered, well designed, they work well, closed-garden in every way, very expensive, and it works well but prices don't reflect their product's real-world performance. (And I know that is very fanboy-ish of me to say... but it's true. Say what you will about AMD or nVidia, but AMD has generally sold cards that perform on-par with nVidia's offering for the same performance tier, but for less.)
So, I recently wrote about the price table for nVidia and AMD in their GPU offerings. Here it is (again) from the link I left you guys, a few paragraphs above:
AMD:
R9 290X -- 550$ USD
R9 290 Non-X -- 450$ USD (good news for this card, bad news for release date: www.techpowerup.com/193497/radeon-r9-290-non-x-launch-pushed-back-a-week... )
R9 280X -- 300$ USD (it's getting a new revision: www.techpowerup.com/193366/amd-to-release-radeon-r9-280x-revision-this-l... for lower heat output, which means higher overclocks and/or lower noise - let's hope partners like GIGABYTE, MSI and ASUS make a v2 or Rev2.0 to make it explicit that it includes the new GPU, a definite marketing point!)
R9 270X -- 200$ USD
R7 260X -- 140$ USD
nVidia:
GTX TITAN -- 1000$ USD
GTX 780 Ghz / GTX 780 Ti (who knows the name?!) -- 700$ USD (the amount of VRAM for this card is currently unknown, albeit I expect 6GB if the price is going to be 700$, but for 600$ it might only have 3GB)
GTX 780 Non-Ti / GTX 780 Non-Ghz (who bloody cares anymore?) -- 500$ USD
GTX 770 2GB -- 329$ USD (4GB price unknown?)
GTX 760 2GB -- 250$ USD // 4GB -- 300$ (price cut expected, due to price proximity with GTX 770)
GTX 660 Non-Ti 2GB -- 180$ USD
GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB -- 150$ USD
GTX 650 Ti Boost 1GB -- 130$ USD
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- The nVidia Section:
Now, those are the new price points according to the latest news and leaks (as of the 31st of October, 2013). Now, here's what nVidia needs to launch:
GTX 760 Ti - Basically, it would be an overclocked GTX 670 that performs close to the GTX 680 levels, and would most likely have the same clocks as the original GTX 680, except with 1344 CUDA Cores. For this to sell, it would have to come under 300$ so the price-to-performance ratio would still be competitive against AMD's R9 280X offerings, especially with the new revised GPU inside. I'd say 259$ would be great, but nVidia would have to sell the GTX 760 Non-Ti for around 229$ for that to happen. It most likely will never be released, since it would involve more engineering and it wouldn't be that good of a card to release. There's not much need for it, and nVidia isn't going to compete in price-to-performance against AMD; they want profit for shareholders above anything else, because nVidia knows how to get profits up, and they are a business first and foremost. If it wasn't profitable, nobody would work there because no one would get paid. Right now, nVidia doesn't need to put one more GPU between GTX 760 and GTX 770.
GTX 750 Ti - This would be basically be a GTX 660 Non-Ti with a factory overclock. Although we might see an underclocked GTX 760, or a GTX 760 GPU with 192-bit memory bandwidth, that wouldn't be the case. It wouldn't be as profitable, since performance like that wouldn't have to involve the GK104 GPU. It's cheaper and easier to just get the GTX 660 Non-Ti GPU and overclock it, maybe even increase memory bandwidth to 256-bit (which would make 2GB as the default pretty nice, actually). That all depends on nVidia. I'd love to see this come in with 2GB standard (and no 1GB models), for around 150$~170$ USD, with about 10%~20% more performance than the GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB. Having a new GPU model to compete against the R7 260X and R9 270X would be a great thing for nVidia, as this would help them get more GPUs into the competitive SteamBox/SFF market, and they'd get their GPUs into several entry-level gaming builds, plus they could get people to see/hear more about nVidia by putting their logos on more things. Basically, this segment could just be free marketing for nVidia if they chose to use it.
- The AMD Section:
As you saw, AMD doesn't have anything in between 200$ and 300$. R9 290X and R9 290 Non-X sit at 550$ and 450$, which is nice. So if we half that, it becomes 275$ and 225$. That means that if the R9 280X had a 280 Non-X version, it would probably sit at around 250$... which would put it head-to-head against nVidia's own GTX 760.
Now, since the R9 280X is based on the HD 7970 Ghz GPU... than could we see R9 280 Non-X be a rebranded HD 7950 with temperature sensing (like what nVidia has on their GPUs), automatic clock boost and throttling, and maybe a slight default overclock? Well, I would say that you can count on AMD wanting to get something in that segment soon.
Since AMD is going to have partners ship R9 290X and 290 Non-X with non-reference coolers soon (end of November), I'd assume that might be a great time to launch the R9 280 Non-X (with non-reference coolers, just like the R9 280X did).
I'll also speculate AMD might also launch an R9 270 Non-X in the 170$ range. Not sure if they'd use a rebranded and overclocked (and slightly improved) HD 7850 or not, but that probably would be a good idea for AMD. Makes the job of engineering much simpler, and partners can use the same PCB and the same aftermarket coolers.
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So, that leaves us with this new price chart:
AMD:
R9 290X -- 550$ USD
R9 290 Non-X -- 450$ USD
R9 280X -- 300$ USD
R9 280 Non-X **Speculation!!** -- 250$ USD
R9 270X -- 200$ USD
R9 270 Non-X **Speculation!!** -- 160$~170$ USD
R7 260X -- 140$ USD
nVidia:
GTX TITAN -- 1000$ USD
GTX 780 Ghz / GTX 780 Ti (who knows the name?!) -- 700$ USD (the amount of VRAM for this card is currently unknown, albeit I expect 6GB if the price is going to be 700$, but for 600$ it might only have 3GB)
GTX 780 Non-Ti / GTX 780 Non-Ghz (who bloody cares anymore?) -- 500$ USD
GTX 770 2GB -- 330$ USD (4GB price unknown?)
GTX 760 Ti **Speculation!!** -- 260$~280$ USD
GTX 760 2GB -- 250$ USD // 4GB -- 300$ (price cut expected, due to price proximity with GTX 770) [My speculation would be that if the GTX 760 Ti were to come in, which I doubt, the GTX 760 would have to sell for 220$~230$ USD for the 2GB model)
GTX 750 Ti **Speculation!!** -- 150$~180$ USD
** REPLACED (if my speculations are correct) ** GTX 660 Non-Ti 2GB -- 180$ USD
GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB -- 150$ USD
GTX 650 Ti Boost 1GB -- 130$ USD
(Both of the GTX 650 Ti cards would receive slight price drops, if the GTX 750 Ti does appear. A GTX 750 Non-Ti might be released eventually, but who knows? If a GTX 750 Non-Ti were to appear, I'd say it would have to be somewhere in the 125$~140$ USD range.)