NVIDIA announced the third performance addition to its new Kepler family of 28 nm GPUs (the 600 Series). Many were writing NVIDIA off when AMD beat it to the market, dropping Graphics Core Next (GCN) on the market in January and then fleshing its lineup out in following months.
While AMD likely did gain from the head start, NVIDIA is ready to respond. Not only did the GeForce GTX 680 decimate AMD in single-card performance, but now the GeForce GTX 670 has arrived to go toe-to-toe with the Radeon HD 7950 -- AMD's similar price offering -- and pull into a rough tie with the Radeon HD 7970, a card which commands $80 USD more today. When you throw in NVIDIA's GPU computing lead, it's in an excellent buy.
To be clear, an AMD price cut is all but certain. Diamond's card already dropped to $450 USD (still $50 USD more than the GTX 670) on Newegg.com, and PowerCooler trimmed $20 off the MSRP. More cuts will likely follow in days to come.
But NVIDIA has certainly thrown down the gauntlet with its latest launch and will all but surely see strong sales.
If there's a weakness to be said for the Kepler lineup it's that the company is still missing a low-to-mid range option, say a $300-$340 USD GeForce GTX 660. There's the ultra-high GeForce GTX 690 -- a dual-GPU card that launched at the end of April, there's the $500 flagship GTX 680, the high-end single die solution, and there's the new GTX 670. But the 28 nm Kepler GK104 does not reach lower than $400 USD -- yet.
NVIDIA does have some other, lower end, GeForce 600 series cards that are shipping to OEMs, built on the general Kepler format -- GK107, GK114, GK116, and GK119. But these aren't mass market cards and they're built on a 40 nm process and thus are bound to not enjoy as great power and temperature performance as their 28 nm kin.
