Last month of May, Nvidia has unveiled the latest in its powerful line of graphics cards GTX 1080 and 1070.

Nvidia demonstrated the power of the new GTX 1080 graphics cards by playing Doom at 1080p resolution with all the graphics properties maxed out. The result is a highly impressive 200 frames per second.

For such great power, Nvidia is actually offering the graphics card at a pretty reasonable price. The GTX 1080, which launched on May 27, would be priced at $699 for the special Founder's Edition and $599 for the regular model. This is what was announced, atleast.

Pricing of GTX 1080 in Indian Market by Amazon.in

On May 27, when the GTX 1080 graphics card are officially released and officially available in Amazon.in (India's one of top three online shopping eCommerce website) Indian gamers, tech-lovers gets shock of their life.

Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS have listed their price 57% to 87% higher than the price announced at the Nvidia launch event.

• Zotac asking for U$D +411 (+59%) extra!
• Gigabyte asking for U$D +396 (+57%) extra!
• ASUS asking for U$D +411 (+59%) extra!

also

• ASUS non-Founder's Edition asking for U$D +525 (+87%) extra!
  (This is epic to see non-Founder's Edition is more expensive than Founder's Edition)

Shocked, disappointed and angry Indians found their way to take revenge.

They are flooding the Amazon product pages of Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS with 1 STAR reviews and negative comments.

For Indians, this is the perfect weapon for them to show their protest and grab the attention of greedy managements of Nvidia, Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS.

Their anger has one common point, 57% to 87% extra can not be due to Tax. Shipping cost also do not add that much extra charge specially other graphics card are coming from the same factory, same country, China.


Their demand is simple, Price Equality. They are not asking for subsidized price, rather equal price that is being sold in US, plus Govt. Tax.
Even though, the USN to INR exchange rate has gone up from @55 to @66, they they are willing to pay $599 / $699 as advertised on release event.

Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Graphics Card "Founders Edition"

Great job by NVIDIA and Zotac for selling a U$D 699 card at U$D 1110 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! Extra: U$D 411 (+59%)

Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 "Founders Edition" 8GB GDDR5X VR-Ready/Pascal Architecture 256-bit PCI-Express Graphics Card

Great job by NVIDIA and Gigabyte for selling a U$D 699 card at U$D 1095 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! Extra: U$D 396 (+57%)

Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 "Founders Edition" 8GB GDDR5X VR-Ready/G-Sync/PascalTM architecture PCI-Express Graphics Card

Great job by NVIDIA and ASUS for selling a U$D 699 card at U$D 1110 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! Extra: U$D 411 (+59%)

ASUS nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 DirectCU III ROG Strix Gaming Aura RGB 8GB GDDR5X VR-Ready/G-Sync/Pascal Architecture PCI-Express Graphics Card

Great job by NVIDIA and ASUS for selling a U$D 599 card (non-Founder's Edition) at U$D 1124 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! The price is even higher than the "Founder's Edition"! Extra: U$D 525 (+87%)

Nvidia GTX 1080 Reviews by YouTubers

Last month of May, Nvidia unveiled the latest in its powerful line of graphics cards GTX 1080 and 1070 and announced the release date as May 27th, 2016.

But, before the official release, YouTube site was filled with GTX 1080 preview and reviews and even mods/overclocking by thousands of YouTube and tech-sites reviewers.

Where they get the card(s) from? Did they buy those cards?
The cards were not available in the market yet!

Answer: They got the cards FREE from Nvidia.

Some of them got multiple pcs, multiple editions to show-off their SLI setup.
As they don't have to buy, they even started wining about the limitation that GTX 1080 can not have more than 2-way SLI. For them they want to do 4-way SLI or more and want all cards for free from Nvidia.

No YouTuber or tech-site mention whether they bought the card by their own money or got them for FREE.

Now, Nvidia has to recover these money that they gave away as thousands of free graphics cards for those YouTubers and tech-sites.

Simple, add the cost with the Retail MRP / MSRP price, specially for the developing market.
Customers are dumb-ass here. Just milk them.

Nvidia Market Share

Even though there is competition in the graphics card market, and there is a push from the AMD red-team, the percentage is not well balanced. Its almost 56% vs 25% according to latest Steam Hardware Survey, which is not accurate but close enough. That is Nvidia has more than double market share than AMD and more than AMD alone and more than Intel HD and AMD combined.

In Indian market also, we have more vendors from Nvidia team than AMD team.
In Nvidia team, there are ASUS, Zotac, Gigabyte, MSI and few eVGA also.
In AMD team, there is mainly Sapphire and few XFX and PowerColor.
(Survey based on Kolkata retail market. There are some other brands available but they do not have any service center in Kolkata nor India. They are sold directly by the importers through eCommerce websites like Amazon.in / Flipkart / Snapdeal etc.)

Also at the launch of Nvidia GTX 1080, there is not a single competitor card in the arsenal of AMD red-team.

All these market factors gave Nvidia the power of market monopoly.
And so they can now list their price 57% to 87% higher than the price announced at the Nvidia launch event.

And no one can complain. Or is it?

Indian Customers Response

Shocked, disappointed and angry Indians found their only way to take revenge. They are flooding the Amazon product pages of Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS with 1 STAR reviews and negative comments. They can not contact the greedy managements of Nvidia, Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS. Neither those managements ever showed any interest to read the mentality of Indian customers and gamers. Do they really ever did any market study here?

These types of absurd pricing of Processor and Graphics card, makes PC gamers like us switch to Console gaming which is far far cheaper and long-term maintenance free. Games may be expensive but just wait for 2nd-hand sale.

This weapon of 'Mass -ve Review' is not new to Indian customers. Few months ago, when one famous India actor made some controversial comments about the living condition in India, Indian people got so angry that they started to post negative reviews in another online e-commerce website. They flooded the website with negative reviews of every product they bought. At the end, he had to step down as the brand-ambassador of that website.

DO NOT MESS WITH ANGRY INDIANS.
In-fact, don't make them angry in the 1st place.

We have to see if there is any change on pricing before or after the launch of upcoming AMD graphics card.

XFX and MSI, both, unveils their latest Dx10 graphics cards incorporating the newest NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT/GTS and GeForce 8600 GT graphics processor which deliver superior cinematic resolution and high performance acceleration for today’s demanding 3D graphic applications.

These cards include various state-of-the-art technologies such as the NVIDIA Lumenex™ Engine which delivers stunning image quality and floating point accuracy at ultra-fast frame rates. Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0 for great gaming experiences, and OpenGL 2.0 to ensure top-notch compatibility and performance for all OpenGL 2.0 applications.

Preview 

8500 GT with 256mb RAM 

8600 GT with 265mb RAM

8600 GTS with 256mb RAM 

MSI's entire Line-up

Price Chart

XFX 8600 series graphics card will be available along with 3 years warranty at a suggested end user price beginning Rs 6,200 for 8500GT, Rs 10,000 for 8600 GT and Rs 16,500 for 8600 GTS from all the 50 Rashi branches and select Rashi partners across India.

Where as, MSI cards will be available all-over the country via MSI’s Authorised Distribution branches such as Tirupati and other resellers.

Sony India has announced the official launch of the Sony PlayStation 3 console in the Indian market along with PS3 hardware accessories and 12 gaming titles. Jayant Sharma, CEO, Milestone Interactive, India, the authorized distribution partner of EA’s PlayStation 3 titles said, “We are very excited with the support that EA is providing to the PlayStation3 launch in India" cont...

"And we are sure that their titles will accelerate the growth of the PlayStation console format in India. EA’s PlayStation 3 titles will retail at an MRP of Rs. 2799 and will available at all major retail stores across the country,” says.

The Sony PS3 represents the next generation entertainment platform featuring the revolutionary Cell processor running at 3.2GHz with 7 SPEs, a 2x Blu-ray disk Drive, Built-In card reader which supports Memory Stick Duo, SD/MMC and CompactFlash (CF) Cards; for the graphics, PS3 is juiced by nVidia Developed RSX GPU featuring 256MB GDDR3 Video Ram. The PS3 also sports a 60GB SATA Hard drive, and built in Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) adapter as well as Gigabit (1000Mbit) Ethernet Port. PS3 also features State-of-The-Art SIXAXIS wireless controller which allows gamers to physically turn, twist, and bank their controllers to command the on-screen action.

Features in guest

The heart of PS3 beats through the Cell Broadband Engine, one of the most-advanced computer processors in the world, that allows massive floating point calculation. It is alomost a Super Computer on your desk. The PS3 is backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 Games, meaning your old games won’t go to waste.  Furthermore, The PSP can be connected to PS3 via Wi-Fi to Transfer Data files browse the web. It can also bouble up as a Blu-Ray Media Center and allows you to watch BD-DVD Titles at 1080p (1920×1080 Resolution) With Dolby TrueHD/ PCM Uncompressed Audio. You can also view pictures (BMP, TIFF, JPG, PNG) and listen to music on the PS3. The formats supported are Sony’s Own ATRAc, AAC, WAV and the ever popular - MP3. The PS3 comes bundled with an online web browser to surf the internet.

Price

The 60GB PlayStation 3 will carry a hefty price tag of Rs.39,999/- at launch. With Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Core Version Selling for Rs.17,999/- and the premium 20GB version selling for Rs.23,999/- Sony has some stiff competition to face. Sony might have had a better chance going against the Xbox 360 in India if they would have released the 20 GB PS3 console as its price would have been on par with the Xbox 360. But, consider few things before you judge its huge price. You nether get a Super Computer in such a 'low price' nor a Blue-Ray player.

Titles 

At The Launch, PS3 Will have 12 titles available for gamers to buy. These titles will include first party games such as Resistance: Fall of Man, MotorStorm, Genji: Days of the Blade, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, Formula One Championship Edition to Third party hits like Ridge Racer 7, Def Jam: Icon, Fight Night Round 3, NBA Street: Homecourt , Need for Speed: Carbon, The Godfather: The Don’s Edition, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007. All the titles will be available from Mumbai based Milestone Interactive Ltd at the pricetag of Rs.2,799/-

SIXAXIS wireless controller

The SIXAXIS wireless controller will cost Rs 2,990/-. Blu-ray Remote Control and HDMI Cable (high defintion media interface) will retail at Rs.1,999/- each ! !

Does the PS3 have what it takes to repeat the success of its predecessor PS2 ? Sony might be banking on its huge PS2 user base in India to upgrade to the PS3. PS2 presently costs around Rs.8,000/- in India and the price is expected to go further down with the launch of the PS3. The relatively quick launch, ready availability and presence in the Indian markets is definitely a step in the right direction. What happens next? Your guess is as good as ours. Some price cuts down the line won’t hurt Sony much ! But if Nintendo ever decides to launch it’s Wii console in India it will be a whole new ball game altogether.