Well, I would imagine market dynamics play into it too. You look at the big players in the memory market (and who produces the GDDR3/GDDR5 most commonly used by ATi) and it may make sense for them to really invest in the newer GDDR5 technology and put more of it on their cards. I doubt that it is marketing hype because most consumers don't actually seem to mind buying DDR2 versions of cards which, for all practical purposes, should have GDDR3 on them to get the designed level of performance out of their chips.
I didn't try to imply that was the only reason, but it is a big one. Just look at the second image in the OP. Ati is doing a lot of number trickery lately, GDDR5 (no mention to 128 bits...), GFLOPs (no mention to ROP power or texturing abilities??), performance/watt/$ given in GFLOPS/watt/$ (WTF!! Since when that means anything? :shadedshu).
Anyway my post was more to say that it's not the actual price the reason they went GDDR5, of course it's expected that GDDR5 prices will drop and then 128+GDDR5 will probably be cheaper, in just months. And by moving it to mainstream cards they will certainly make GDDR5 prices drop, which is good for their entire family. But IMO GDDR5 in
this card is in no way to make it cheaper to produce.
To me anyway, the only people it makes a difference to marketing-wise are the not-so-average Joe's out there (like us), who will feel that ATi is pushing innovation with newer equipment and technologies a lot harder than nVidia is, which... Well, is actually more truth than hype.
That is very subjective. I couldn't care less about what the card has attached as long as it is fast, and let's get real Nvidia owns the performance crown in almost every segment (except low-end and low mainstream) at this moment. Apart from that, GPUs are for playing games the best way possible and in that respect Nvidia has been doing
much more than Ati, i.e with PhysX. Now that is innovation and not a hardware feature that might or might not be an improvement (GDDR4?). At least IMO.
Anyway it's clear you've bought their marketing hype, because of how you think that more than-average Joe is only the one that can see Ati as innovation. I am an enthusiast and I don't see Ati innovating so much, except for the use of GDDR5 and a move to an smaller fab process, none of them are theirs and fab process is hardly innovation, it's just tweaking the fabrication of the chips.
Maybe I'm more immersed in the labyrinths of GPU architecture and that's why I see much more innovation in GT200 than I do in RV770. I'm not talking about what they have attached externally, I'm not talking about the jewelery. I'm talking about the efficient and powerful shaders, how thread management is resolved, cache hierarchy and its semi-coherency, architecture oriented at keeping a better balance of ILP (Instruction level parallelism) and TLP (Thread...), etc.
Both companies have a different take on what a future (GP)GPU must be, and thanks to
both of them the industry keeps moving, by one copying the other and so on. It's not only Ati as the hype is trying to make believe (and TBH with high success, they could use Ati's campaign as example in marketing schools).
