Sorry to nvidia fans. But for my opinion, This card is a 'meh' for me
My opinion to the 660 and above of the nvidia's kepler cards is like 'wow' (except the 660, not that much of a 'wow'
) and the most awesome thing that they did is that they force AMD to lower their card prices. But Their >$200 card is a little lacking to be honest. 640, only performs like an old 450 but with $100 price tag (7750 is just like $5 more and faster). The 650 performs like the 7750 (only a microscopic 'faster' if you don't agree), yet priced $10 more at least. And, the 7770 is faster and doesn't have that kind of a big gap (just like $5 more).
The same case with this card, minimum at $155 in newegg. This card doesn't touch the 7850 at all. And I am sure it will not even touch the 1GB 7850. And even... I found it for just $175 in newegg (just $20 more). Yes it does beat the 7770, but the 7770 is just minimum at $125 ($30 less).
Just my thoughts... nvidia should concentrate more on their sub $200 division of cards to be quite honest. Although they once released a pretty successful ~<$200 card the 460.
Also, additional stuff. I think TPU should add benchmarks only containing the 650 Ti (or whatever the card is) which is given as sample from nvidia or non-OC'd card so People wouldn't get confused about the result. Also, why is the 660 beating the 7870? I don't think it used to be like that.
While I stated this in some other threads already, I also do it here now: I think Keplers are not that bad on the sub $200 segment as they might seem to be. I think they do quite well when it comes to casual gaming, except one thing, and that is: "a little high prices", so I'm kinda agree with you, but I also disagree a little.
You are judging the value of the product based solely on the price. If you are an enthusiast, you snap in two 670s into your rig or even two 680s, and you won't give a flying **** about power consumption and price, but if "you" only have $150 for a card, it's suddenly turns into an entirely different story.
With hundreds of built systems behind me, I can tell you that the majority of this segment don't want and won't notice that extra difference what the 7850 offers (let alone the fact that you are comparing launch prices to a price of the product which was released half a year ago, and which will cost a lot more after 2-3 years because of the 10% extra on the electricity bills). There are many of course who want but simply can't afford a better card, and those will go for the 7850 because they still want higher performance. but the majority won't.
If the budget only allows $150 for a card they won't spend $170 on it, and Nvidia knows this, and that's all they care about when they design/limit the performance of the product and when they set the price.
Nowadays casual gamers care more about how much power the card will consume, what content or games are you get with the package, 3D support, physx, etc, so these kind of practical extras, and not
about fps. Not a long time ago cards like the 6850 were the all around winners, because nobody cared about these secondary attributes, but the trend is changed a lot in the segment. They want games like Call of Duty, Minecraft or Dota to run perfectly in lower resolutions (eg 768p or 1050p), while they also want it quiet and green, and they surely won't care about and/or use >=4xAA (which is one of the main weakness of these 128-192bit cards btw.)
The market of discrete graphics is shrinking rapidly, and I think Nvidia is going in the right direction now, because they give beasts for the enthusiasts and great content and value for the lower segments. All they need to do now is to lower the prices just a little bit to counter AMD's aggressive price policy.
Well let's be honest here, they are in trouble indeed, but not because the chip is bad, but because lowering prices is really hard when you are selling less..... but that's not our problem, because the greater the price war there is, the better is gonna be for us