AMD recently executed a new price plan for its Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. The problem is that AMD’s partners that sells graphics cards based on the new ATI graphics circuits doesn’t want to lower the price of Radeon HD 4870, they simply think the card is good enough to remain at the current price. AMD intended to lower HD 4870 to 149 USD, which would put the card in direct competition with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTS 250 (formerly known as 9800GTX+).
But AMD’s partners says that 4870 is just as good, if not even better, than GeForce GTX 260 and should be priced accordingly, which is 199 USD. Multiple partners has instead used the 1GB version of Radeon HD 4850 to compete with GTS 250.
AMD are truly aggressive with its prices, but now it is starting to anger partners which seem to have greater faith in AMD’s products than AMD self. Even if AMD wants the new prices to becomes available through mail-in rebates it is still sending a clear signal to NVIDIA, which is bleeding due to its poor margins. We will just have to wait and see if the tactics will succeed.
