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?"

Comments

Simple, because they're expensive

[jason_watkins]

Graphics cards and chipsets are expensive. There's just no way around that at. Current graphics chip die sizes make current cpu die sizes seem patheticly small. They have very wide, rather complex memory subsystems. Most graphics cards now are 256 bit bused to memory, that's 4 times what's common on the desktop. That means the pcb cards themselves are quite expensive. The pace of the market is staggeringly fast, a new architecture every year, a process shrink every 6 months. Compare that to AMD having a new architecture every 4 years, and intel every 6 or so. I believe nVidia has 3 parellel design teams in order to keep up the pace of releases. The market simply doesn't forgive anyone who doesn't hit these performance points. Take a look at how little the matrox card is selling.

Some companies are trying to move down. Trident's latest offering is actually quite clever at getting DX9 capability at a very low price.

But the fact is, you've got a low volume market with expensive chips, boards, memory and design, where buyers punish medicre offerings. That's just the way it is. If it were so easy to make a GF4 class card at a sub $100 price point, don't you think someone would have done it by now to rake in the $$?

Re:Because people pay for them. : )

[twiztidlojik]

See, the reason the Xbox is so awesome at fill rates and AA is that it's running at way below standard useable resolutions. I'm talking 480x320, and that's not exactly a lot of pixels. Hell, you can get by on a cheap card at friggin low resolution, but you lose a lot. I find myself shooting at elevators and such in Unreal Tournament on my four-year-old iMac because I can't tell the difference between them and people. You must realize that there is a resolution cap on the XBox, and the video card in it is acceptable at that resolution. Those of us running UT 2003 at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and high detail, on the other hand, aren't using the XBox.

Try being a Mac user

[dr00g911]

$299 up until 3 weeks ago. It's $229 now that the 9000 is out.

An ATI Radeon 8500 OEM card for wintel cost $99. Non-OEMs cost about $129.

The difference?

Zilch. Zero. Fuck all.

A sticker, a box, and just a few k on the flash rom.

Not to plead the case of the poor-trod-upon-mac-nazi, but...

nVidia Geforce 4 Ti dual-head for PC: $199

nVidia Geforce 4 Ti dual-head for the Mac: $399 (as of today)

I guess my point is that some of us have it worse than you might imagine.