(03-09-2015, 03:55 AM)SteelCrysis Wrote: Exactly. There's no motivation to price gouge. I'm still worried about the negative effects of monopoly, just not in price gouging. People love to forget about AMD's $750 and $1000 CPUs back in the day.
That is not necessarily true. Although they would not say, price a GM204 type GTX980 chip at $1000, the price would surely not stay at $500. We have already seen that on GT200 days, when it was released at $650, without a huge improvement over G80 to justify the much higher price tag. Only AMD's release of Radeon 4870 brought the price down to normal. That shows that there would definitely be a price gouge, just not an extreme one. But any dollar lost by the consumer under a monopoly situation should be seen as bad situation, irrespective of how much. Another effect from nVIDIA having a monopoly would be slower gains with each generation. Especially considering that they have a huge power over the PC Gaming Market with tools like GameWorks, they would have all the liberty in the world to dictate how PC gaming should evolve making it harder and harder for new comers to enter the market. nVIDIA having a monopoly is end game for PC gaming market and that should make all of us worried, whether we are nVIDIA fans or not.
Do not commit the mistake of seeing either nVIDIA or AMD as good/bad guys. They are money making businesses driven by shareholders who assess the business success not from technological POV (most of them probably do not even understand how computers work) but from the money it brings in. That was in fact what brought AMD down after K8 success. Instead of pushing the R&D envelope further, they opted to cash out. Under a monopoly situation, do not have any doubt that nVIDIA shareholders will do the same or worse.
Off-topic: The security question on the new forum registration process is very american based. I had to research who the hell the guy is and what show does he host to be able to answer. I do not think it would be hard for a bot to answer either. After all we already have Google Now/Siri/Cortana for who that is a piece of cake.