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Why Do Graphics Cards Cost So Much?
Tamor writes "As an avid PC games player I'm locked into the perpetual hardware upgrade cycle like everyone else, but one thing really irks me. While other hardware has come down in price, graphics card pricing has spiralled beyond belief. Not only are graphics cards usually the single most expensive item in a gaming PC, they don't seem to be subject to the usual market forces. Instead of new generation cards forcing down the price of old cards, the old cards are simply phased out, and the likes of nVidia have a range wide enough to keep the high-end cards at the same prices for the forseeable future.
Why is this? Why does a top of the range graphics card cost so much more than an entire PS2 or X-Box system? Is it the lack of competition in the market following the demise of 3DFX or are there other forces at work. What do slashdotters thing about this pricing?"
Why is this? Why does a top of the range graphics card cost so much more than an entire PS2 or X-Box system? Is it the lack of competition in the market following the demise of 3DFX or are there other forces at work. What do slashdotters thing about this pricing?"
Maybe you need to look outside of your local chain megastore.
I don't want to link to their website because there's no reason for them to sustain the bandwidth hit, but my local little chain store has a TNT2 32MB for $40, and that's still a lot of graphics card if you're not a FPS player. Heck, my little TNT2 8MB I got at that price a year ago is still respectable for most uses.
They have a pretty smooth progression from that up to top-of-the-line cards, such as a GeForce2 MX200 32MB for $60, a GeForce4 MX 64MB DDR for $120, and so on up to $350 TI4600 128MB. In all, there are 8 nVidia-based choices and 10 ATI choices ranging from $60-$400.
I don't think the problem you complain about exists for real.
If a critical mass of perpetual upgraders suddenly became content and the manufactures were left with only new PC sales for income we would see a price war like the CPU market.
I think it's really a matter of realizing you don't have to have the best video card or all the hottest new games. "You are not your AGP graphics card."
If nVidia isn't giving you what you want, buy a different brand. That is part of the problem... so many people are willing to pay top dollar for the best available card that all trailing companies go out of business or just can't compete.
Actually I don't see the problem here even with nVidia... I get by fine on cheap video cards from them; nVidia typically offers a top of the line card and a budget line... I buy budget line... in fact I'm using an nForce chipset built into the mother board.
Another thing is that you don't have to buy a new card that often. The longer you wait and make do with what you have the more satisfying the upgrade is anyway.
I think it has to do with the perceived "users" of these cards.
Like the poster above pointed out, there are perfectly acceptable graphic cards out there for very reasonable prices.
However, when you want the "top of the line" card, you're making a different kind of statement. It's similar to those who purchase top of the line stereo equipment. I have a cheap bookshelf system I bought a K-Mart for around $150 bucks. It's a perfectly fine stereo system, I listen to it all the time. However, if I wanted a top of the line stereo system, I would have to pay at least five times as much, if not more. The price discrepancy is based on quality, on workmanship, but also...on status. Having a really souped up stereo system is also a statement. Part of your purchase price goes into that statement.
The same thing goes for graphics cards. Once you get beyond "normal" use and start wanting to have "the best of the best", expect to pay more, not just for the cost of the item itself, but for the additional "status" benefits that it allows you.
This status thing applies to every aspect of commercial life. Think t-shirts. Just how much better is a Versace t-shirt than the kind you can get at a chain department store?
For all I know, I may be totally wrong. Maybe the price is more because the components or manufacturing process is more expensive. But I think that if the cards were lower priced, some people wouldn't believe that they *were* top of the line.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Bandwidth to graphics cards has been a giant bottleneck up until a few years ago. Back in the ISA days it didn't matter how many pixels your GPU could crunch - the problem was getting the info to it. Either the bus was too slow or the CPU couldn't generate it fast enough. Now that so much functionality has been offloaded to graphics processors and they can be fed information fast enough, it make sense to have processing done there. A new-fangeld GPU has about as many transistors as a newfangeld CPU - why shouldn't they in the same ballpark when it comes to price?
Okay, you're complaining about $400 graphics cards? What's the big deal? There are also $80 graphics cards out there. Buy those.
"No, I need the best, " you think? The same goes for most other markets that have a broad range of quality/price options. You can buy a high-end Porche, but you're going to pay for it.
You can get an $80 graphics card. The cost for that may well be running games a bit later than the $400 people do, or running with less resolution, or whatever. But that $80 graphics card destroys a few-year-old $300 graphics card, so it really isn't that big of a deal. You're getting a better deal these days -- you just can't buy top of the line. No biggie.
May we never see th
One other reason the price is so high, is because all the gamers keep buying. If they can sell it at a high price, then they will. Same principal works for the McDonalds on the sides of highways in the middle of nowwhere...They can sell their value meals starting at $8 because people will pay that much. Simple supply and demand.
I was always under the impression that video cards were cheap, depressingly so if you're a hardware maker. Considering the quick rate of improvement, the complexity of graphics technology, and the fabs required to make the chipsets, they seem pretty cheap compared to say, cpu's.
Sure, the top of the line stuff has been $200 for a long time (now $300 or more). But within a 1/2 year, your top card goes down to $100 or less.
That doesn't seem much for a cutting edge part of your PC.
The mass production angle is an important one, but not the only one. PS2 is (or at least was) sold at a break-even point. XBox was sold at a loss. Neither have enough GPM (gross profit margin) to recoup their development expenses. Thus, it's important to remember that PS2 and XBox are subsidized by software sales, since their respective manufacturers collect licensing fees on games sold for those platforms. In contrast, NVidia et al. do not charge heavy licensing fees to game developers to get them to use their cards. Heck, it's more like the card developers go out and evangelize their specific technology tweaks to try to get buy-in -- they practically beg for people to develop to their cards, as opposed to slapping them with onerous license fees.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
So please, just because someone has different priorities than you do doesn't mean that they're stupid.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Try being a Mac user
Well, that is one of the prices that you would expect to pay using a hardware platform that is not as widely in use. If the situation were reversed, and Macs were the dominant computing platform, then the price situation would most likely be reversed as well.
Not saying you should switch, or being critical, not at all. Just pointing out the factual reality of the platform decisions we make.
That wasn't exactly the point I was making.
I realize that it takes additional money for Mac-side driver/firmware/software development.
The point is that on all sides vendors are fixing the prices of their products -- (against the idea of 1.5% markup) -- in a lot of cases on the Mac side at 200% the price of the *exact*same*widget* on the wintel side. Far more markup than additional driver development should allow for.
Hell, CompUSA is just as guilty of this as video card vendors. I can remember clearly when Warcraft II was released, and the Myst trilogy was rereleased. Hybrid Mac & PC in the same box, and the same exact packaging. $15 price difference depending on which "shelf" you bought it off of in the store. They may have had an after-the-fact "Made for Mac" sticker on the box. I don't remember.
The next time you walk in your neighborhood superstore, do some comparison shopping between the Mac & PC sections for hardware bits (keyboards, mice, hard drives). In a lot of cases, you'll see the original SKU covered by a sticker with the "Mac Pricing" sku/barcode for widgets that are available in two different parts of the store.
Back to my point -- since the widespread advent of the 'Net, a lot of Mac users ignore the "Mac Sections" of those stores for everything but (2-year-old and "premium" priced) games and either pick up the comparable widget from across the store, or order the stuff online. Because they know better.
I'd imagine that it's skewing the sales figures pretty heavily and isn't showing a true picture of the platform distribution -- which in turn drives prices up again and gets products discontinued.
Then (even further afield) you've got products like the Creative Mac Blaster -- which never worked and never will work, but we still paid a premium for.
Make no mistake: value-add hardware is priced just under the average "threshold of pain" for the target market -- and there's a feeling in the industry that Mac users have even more cash to throw around than die-hard gamers.
I have wondered the same thing myself, on just about every component of a computer system. I have wondered the same thing about laptops - why can't I buy a laptop with a cheap monochrome screen, or with a low-spec processor - and save a ton of money (ie, a laptop for $500). I can't, and there isn't much I can do about it because I am only one person - the market isn't there for such devices.
What I can do, though, is buy used - instead of trying to stay on the bleeding edge, hang off the trailing edge, and know that it will all trickle down eventually.
I can still buy just about any 486 or low-end Pentium laptop for pennies on the dollar of what it originally cost. Same with graphics cards, and other parts. Even whole systems are very cheap. Things that I thought I would never be able to afford can now be found for a fraction of what they sold a short while ago.
For instance, the Spacetec Spaceball - a 3D input controller. Back in the mid-90's, you would have had to pay around $2000.00 for this device. Today, off of Ebay, one can be had for $20-25.00! Even the best model (made by HP, I think) only goes for about $200! Last year I purchased a professional level VR HMD for $250.00 - it used to retail for around $3000.00! I recently purchased a 28-bay CDNet cd server with 14 SCSI drives for $200.00 - not too many years ago these were selling for around $10,000! Finally, we have all seen the "free Cray to whoever will haul it away"-type deals on Ebay and elsewhere - these are super-computers we are talking about, things that ordinary people at one time couldn't even DREAM about owning, but I would bet there are a few people using them now in their basement (while the rest are "making do" with Beowulf style clusters). My work recently gave me a PII-300 and motherboard - not too long ago, do you have any idea what that would have cost me? Here it is being GIVEN to me, otherwise it was TRASH!
When people throw out or darn near "give" away hardware, why bother staying on the "bleeding edge"? VERY FEW applications even require todays "mid-range" hardware - most people can get by with older equipment no-problem. I suspect that in a few years, unless something "great" comes along that we can't live without, we will see a massive decline in sales of hardware - because most people won't need it or want it. The other thing that makes the older hardware a great thing is that if things keep going like they are, what with DRM, etc - all of that old hardware will be worth $$$$ on the grey/black market - considering that the junk is being given or thrown out now, should such a situation exist with DRM, people might be throwing away a good investment, in a manner of speaking.
Finally, I leave you with this - think about that $400 video card, think about what it is capable of. Then think about what that power would have cost you back in the mid-1990's. If you don't have a clue, look into the REAL top-of-the-line offerings by companies like Evans and Sutherland (ie, simulator graphics engines) - prepare to break out a cool $10,000 to $20,000 - for the LOW END. Then realize that this power will be available to the consumer for gaming and other tasks a mere 5-10 years from now...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The difference?
Zilch. Zero. Fuck all.
So stop complaining and buy the PC version, flash the rom, and use it in your mac. I've got a flashed Radeon 8500 and a flashed adaptec SCSI card in my mac. The SCSI card was the real no-brainer. $100 instead of $369, and flashing it for use in a mac is a supported operation. All the tools are available on the Adaptec site and run in MacOS X.
I think the high price on "Mac" stuff that's clearly identical to PC stuff (Drives, USB stuff, Memory, Many PCI cards) is just a "stupid" tax.