AMD Doesn’t Plan on Letting NVIDIA Get Back Up

Where GPUs are concerned, times are interesting. Over the course of the past two years, NVIDIA dominated the low-end, mid-range and high-end markets, and the outlook for AMD looked grim. But lo and behold, big red had something up their sleeve and what they launched surprised even NVIDIA. That was proven by the fact that NVIDIA dropped their newly-launched GTX 280 by over $200 within the first month. Now that’s hitting someone where it hurts.

According to TG Daily, AMD has little intention to sit back and let NVIDIA redeem themselves. Their internal roadmap lays out plans to launch low-end cards from their 4000-series to compete with NVIDIA’s newly launched 9400 GT, which was launched as a result of apparent increases in demand for low-end discrete graphics – an increase that AMD claims didn’t ever exist.

Aside from the potential low-end cards, AMD is set to launch new mid-range cards next week which include the HD 4650 and HD 4670, both featuring 320 stream processors, along with 512MB and 1GB of memory, respectively. That’s all good… but I think most of us want to see what’s up NVIDIA’s sleeve next, especially after AMD’s recent HD 4870 X2 launch, which was equivalent to a full-blown whiplash for the green side.

We caught up with AMD’s Dave Baumann, who told us that AMD did not notice increasing demand in the $60 segment of graphics cards. However, he noted that demand isn’t decreasing either and has remained stable on a fairly high level. Commenting on Nvidia’s 9400 GT, Baumann said that AMD believes that this 55 nm G96 GPU may not be cheap to produce and represent a “quick-and-dirty-solution” to participate in the $60 market, which aims to provide PC users an affordable upgrade for IGC-equipped PCs.