The battle for supremacy in the cut-throat graphics card market has now reached its climactic peak as NVIDIA starts its foray into the low-to-mid markets with the recent launch of the NVIDIA GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti.
The launch of the new graphics card has now pushed AMD into significantly cutting the price of its similar offering, namely the AMD RX 470 and the RX 460.
Over the course of the year, both companies have been utilizing very different strategies as AMD ddressed the low- to mid markets first, while NVIDIA focused on releasing its top of the line products early on.
NVIDIA proved to dominate the high end markets with its Titan X and 10-series graphics cards, which up to now still does not have any real competition to speak of. AMD also dominated the low- to mid market, with its $179 RX 470 and its cheaper $109 RX 460 GPUs. That reign, however, was short lived as NVIDIA launched their two new mid-market offerings.
According to several reports, the GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti — which are priced at $109 and $139, respectively — blew away AMD's offering in nearly every benchmark test. AMD's offerings performed close to NVIDIA's products only on DirectX 12 and Vulkan tests, but the gap seemed to be very significant when it came to the other benchmark tests.
Given the price tag of NVIDIA's products, consumers were quick to abandon AMD's products as NVIDIA's offerings were the most sensible options.
To respond to NVIDIA's release, AMD has now started to slash the prices of its RX 460 and the RX 460 across all its retailers. The RX 460 now starts at just $100, while the RX 470 is now being offered for $170.
Most retailers are expected to reflect the price changes very soon, but it isn't really clear as of the moment if the reduced prices will dissuade buyers from purchasing NVIDIA's more powerful offerings.
