What happened to AMD's price per performance advantage?

Both. AMD was competing for the middle of the enthusiast market with the 4xxx so they priced their cards at a more value oriented point. At this time, the GTX 285 from nVidia was a clear winner for the high-end so they priced it very high which is in line with what most markets: As you get to the high-end, the price increase isn't linear anymore in regards to price/performance.

With the 7970 and the GTX 680, AMD and nVidia have two products that perform pretty much the same way so both of them would be dumb to sell it cheaper. Therefore, they are actually competing in the high-end enthusiast market and can price their products accordingly. If you look at the middle of the market, AMD still wins most of the time for price/performance with the 7850 and 7770. In Canada, even the 7950 is a slightly better bang for the buck* than the GTX 670 since the 7950 can be found at around 340$ while the GTX 670 is at least 400$ especially for high-resolution gaming and GPGPU tasks.

* According to Techpowerup, the 7950 gives 86% of the GTX 670's performance while costing about 84% of the what the GTX 670 costs.
Edited by Snowmen - 7/11/12 at 8:23am

Best bang-4-buck card I ever bought from them was my 5850.
Paid $260 at launch, flashed it over to an unlocked 5870 BIOS...borrowed a buddy's 5870 ($380-400) and the performance was nearly identical clock-for-clock.

As for now, yea they're both capitalizing on each other's success.

well, i was wondering the same a couple of days before, now that i see this, AMD has increase their prices since they match or outperform their competitor aka Nvidia, look at the GTX670 i have to say its the best you can get for 400dollars and get good frames at every single game.

HD7950 in the other hands its really hard to find at 340dollars, can someone link me one? i dont think 340dollars its worth it. imo
AMD used to have nearly same performance as their competitors for less money, which at high end market GTx670 its doing pretty well,
now if AMD place the regular HD7970 for 400dollars that would be a good dial imo.

Thats a completely wrong analysis. Historically before Nvidia's 8800 GTX, AMD and Nvidia flagship products competed at similar price points. They also competed well on pure performance. AMD's aggressive pricing on the HD 4800 series was based on 2 major factors.
1. The first factor was that AMD fixed the weaknesses of the R600 chip and had the first GPU with GDDR5 memory controller which enabled it to have similar bandwidth from a 256 bit bus width as from a 512 bit DDR3 memory controller used in the GTX 280. This allowed AMD to have a chip much smaller than Nvidia GTX 280 and still remain competitive in perf.
2. The second was that AMD wanted to recover from the loss of brand and reputation from the R600 fiasco by providing aggressive price perf . Also they wanted to regain market share.

In the next generation AMD did even better with HD 5870 arriving to market 6 months earlier. So AMD priced their product wrt the GTX 285 which was selling at USD 380. The prices went up to USD 450 because of lack of competition and limited supply. After the GTX 480 (GF100) launched at USD 500 Radeon HD 5870 settled at USD 400 . Perf/watt was clearly in AMD's favour. But GTX 480's architecture was much superior for DX11 and compute.

Nvidia fixed the issues which plagued the GTX 480 and clearly regained the perf lead with GTX 580 and the GTX 570 competed favourably against AMD HD 6970. This clear leadership existed for 15 months from Nov 2010 to Jan 2012. AMD improved its DX11 architecture with HD 6970 but Nvidia had the clear architecture leadership with GTX 580 (GF110).

But for the current generation things have turned upside down. Nvidia does not have a big die size flagship GK100 which excels at gaming and GPU compute. AMD has the leadership in compute performance and has the GPU gaming performance lead especially considering its lead at ultra high resolutions and multi monitor. You can't expect AMD to price their products lesser with this kind of competitive situation.

Only with GK110 Nvidia will once again have clear perf leadership with the 7 billion transistor massive chip. But we have to wait for AMD's HD 8970 for comparing the two products for perf/watt , perf/$ and perf/sq mm.
Edited by raghu78 - 7/11/12 at 8:43am

As I said, that's in Canada...

Here you go though:

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=13630BD8400&vpn=AX7950%203GBD5-2DH&manufacture=POWERCOLOR
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127667

I just checked Newegg.com for fun and both these cards are also 340$ with a 20$ MIR so that's 320$.

The GTX's overclock better, have more features and run cooler.
http://www.techspot.com/review/550-best-gaming-graphics-cards/

They are FAR from overclocking better. Enjoy your locked voltage and having the same overclocking potential on water or air.

after amd reduced the prices for the radeon 7000 series i think that the 7970 has become the best performance per dollar card and beats the gtx 670 by a large margin. heres a link to a 7970 on newegg for $399 after rebates!
link: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161399

haha right on man! I got my 5850 too before the price hike, I still have it and is an amazing card. I'm sending you a PM!!