I agree on the professional side of those card: they are aimed to a gamers market not a professional on, at least on paper, propert testing and review will tell the truth.
For the price aspect... I'll agree with that in the past, right now, if the performance are what they claim to be, I think its more a marketing aspect then a real value one: is the same marketing tactics that Apple apply for year now, make the thing cost a lot more so that it feel a "premium" item.
I don't say NVidia is on the exact same line, but do to the lack of competion in the GPU card they take advantage of it of course, same as Intel...
You are correct, they are gamer cards, aimed at gamers! I'd just be happy if their cheaper cards worked for professinal use as well. Sadly that is not case. Never was.
Professional limitation doesn't come from that the AMD cards are "just slower". They are in most cases, but No. It comes from that NVidia cards have CUDA cores which is their own tech, AMD cards do not. Lots of prof. software is written specifically to take advantage of CUDA architecture, and isn't compatible with AMD. Those softwares fall back on a "software mode" when run on an AMD card, if they are even capable of doing so, becoming much slower. Like running an old game on CPU-only, with no hardware-acceleration turned on.
You don't need testing for this. In todays true professional software enviroment it is NVidia or nothing :(
I agree on the marketing thing, good catch!
My experience in the studio with real world numbers still say that paying more for an NVidia+Intel pc pays off. Probably not for an avarage gamer! , but for those seeking the highest possible return on their investment in the long term, it's well worth it. So they are not really like Apple, because you do get true + value for the higher price of Intel and NV.
But, as I said above, I'd love to see basically what
@ColdDog said, AMD pushing far beyond the envelope! This would make programmers take notice, and change their software to run properly on AMD cards, making it a viable competitor to NVidia for professionals as well as high-end gamers.
arstechnica.com
