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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.
Wrong...check out PriceWatch. You can still get old stuff from some suppliers for a decent price. For example, there's a GF3 TI200 for 70 bucks and A GF2 TI for 50 bucks. Even the prices on some of the newer GF4's are reasonable.
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.
They cost significantly more to manufacture than the graphics subsystems in a console, for several reasons. First, due to lower sales figures. I have seen some market share data that suggested that high end cards (priced above 300 USD) have less than 1% of the market, but I don't know if that is revenue or units, if its units that is only about 1 million chips/year, its even less if dollars. One design will go into many consoles (Sony recently announced that sales of PS 2s reached 40 million) over a very long period of time, so you can spread your fixed costs over quite a few more chips. Also, consoles are used at very low resolutions so they are not at technically rigorus as PC cards. I think the XBox video system is similar in fill rates to a Gforce 4 MX, but has better AA. Even a three year old card will play new games pretty well at 640x480. The cards do have pretty rigorous AA especially the X-Box.
Finally, Sony and Microsoft are bigger buyers than you and I are, and they get lower prices for buying in volume.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
What do slashdotters thing about this pricing?
Frankly, I think that you are smoking waaaaay too much crack.
The price on the high end of the consumer market has slowly crept up in the last five years, from about $200 for the top-of-the-line 3dfx Voodoo when it came out, to about $300 for the top-of-the-line nVidia GForce 4 today.
But on the low end, the prices are as cheap as ever, while the performance on the low end is simply incredible. A GeForce4MX for $75 today is going to be faster than the best $250 card you could buy two years ago.
There are two reason why you can't walk into BestBuy and get an old TNT2 Ultra for $35. First, because just handling quality control and returns makes it not worth their time to sell you a card that cheap. Second, because despite the fact that the TNT2 was fair to decent two years ago, it is just butt-slow by comparison today. The only people buying boxed 3D cards are gamers, and they're just too smart to do something that stupid.
If you want to see how performance has improved in the last few years, check out this Tom's Hardware guide to VGA cards. And you're asking why someone wouldn't sell you one of the cards near the bottom of the chart? The question you should be asking is what kind of moron would be stupid enough to buy one of them?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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
Graphics cards are expensive because they don't sell in large quantities. The supply of high-end video cards is low so price is high. The supply is low because demand is low. Very few people other than a few gamers per town has a geforce 4. Most people with dells and gateways have whatever old card comes in there. And a whole crapload of pre-built machines come with on-board video. And for the needs of the vast majority of people a TNT2 is more than they will ever need.
My current PC is a Pentium III 450mhz with a TNT2 32MB video card. I bought this machine when the TNT2 first came out. There have been 4 geforce cards since then. And the only games that don't run on my computer are the new UT and America's Army. Every other 3D game runs just fine on my machine.
I plan to buy a new PC soon. So I can encode movies faster and play Doom3. But I'm probably going to buy a motherboard that has the nforce2 chipset. Sure it's a crummy built in video card. But it's a geForce 4 built in. Even though the board probably wont be as fast as a KT400 with DDR400 and a video card in the AGP slot, it's a deal you can't beat. Motherboard, sound card, ethernet card, and video card for the price of just a motherboard. I probably wont use the built in sound card often, but all the operating systems I use fully support having 2 sound cards and using them simultanously, so I dont' see where I can go wrong.
To read more about the nforce2 chipset check out
Nvida or
anandtech
It wont make the fastest gaming machine, but it will still make a good enough one, for a low low price.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
First, the (GeForce 4 Ti | Radeon 9700 | Matrox Parhelia) chip is very complex. The Pentium 4 has about 55 million transistors on it. Compare that with (approximate numbers, of course):
- 63 Million -- (GeForce 4 Ti)
- 80 Million -- (Parhelia)
- 110 Million -- (Radeon 9700)
Damn hard chips to make, even if they're not running at GHz speeds.Now, about that memory... It's at least DDR in most cases (like my GeForce 4 Ti 4200), and runs at much higher speeds than motherboard RAM. 300 MHz (actual!), or "600 MHz DDR" in some cases. That's special stuff -- and expensive.
You're putting 128 MB of that on an add-in card, as much memory for video as I had in my entire computer last year! (Damn...)
Now, about those prices. A mid-range P-4 (2.4 GHz, 133 MHz QDR FSB) runs about $190. Top-of-the-line DDR memory isn't that bad, figure $75 for that part.
190 + 75 = $ 265
No, I don't think modern video card prices are out of line. As (enthusiasts | gamers) we're on the cutting edge, and it costs to be there.
The scary part is that I'm very seriously considering an All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700 for the new computer I'm building my wife. I keep waiting to see what becomes of nVidia's NV30... but if I don't see anything by early December, I'm going with ATI.
God, I'm a nut. Oh well, it drives the economy.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
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.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
$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.
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
There is more silicon on an average graphics card nowadays (and has been for the last five years) than there is on the average CPU - comparing the price of the two it's clear that if anything, graphics cards are comparitively underpriced, not overpriced.
The original poster seems to have made several assumptions and ignored a few basic truths.
First of all, consoles are of fixed specification - today's PS2s are no more or no less powerful than the first units that shipped over two years ago. This lack of development gives the console makers three advantages:
1. No further research and development costs.
Develop a single product one year, reap the
benefits for the next five. Try doing that with a graphics chipset. Five years ago, the 3dfx Voodoo chipset was the hottest thing out there; seen any system builders using that graphics engine recently?
Even the R&D costs for the graphics engine isn't something that the console makers truly have to worry about, as those are borne by the chipset manufacturers - who then fall over each other trying to secure supply agreements with Sony, etc.
2. Better fabrication and higher yields lead to lower costs.
Over time, graphics chips (and all other silicon) becomes cheaper to make, thanks to better fab plants and higher yields. A factory that initially churns out x chips a month might well be churning out 10x chips a month a year down the line, and at little extra cost. A newer factory will improve on that too.
3. The console makers don't have to worry about compatibility issues.
Every product that's aimed at the PC market space has to be thoroughly tested with a wide range of hardware and software to make sure that it works error-free. They will even need third party approval before they can ship (Microsoft Windows approved certification, FCC, CE testing, etc). Graphics cards are no exception to this rule.
Additionally, consoles are a lot easier to support.
If FIFA 2003 doesn't work in your PS2, then either your CD is faulty or your machine is, and it's not going to take more than five minutes to work out which is the problem. But if FIFA 2003 doesn't work out of the box on your PC then you've got a whole lot of work ahead of you before you can safely say what's at fault. Grahpics card (and other hardware and software) manufacturers have to support users in this situation - Sony, etc do not. Support costs money.
Also, early adoption has its price. Buy a PS2 as soon as it's launched and you know that it will cost you more than it would a year or even six months later. The same is true of state of the art graphics cards. PS2s cost less than half of what they did originally. But so do the graphics cards that shipped at the same time as the PS2 was launched.
Lastly, graphics card manufacturers have to turn a profit on every card they make. Console manufacturers don't have that issue - they'll happily loose money on the hardware and make it back on the software you'll be buying.
If you buy FIFA 2003 on the PC then EA makes money but nVidia, ATi, etc do not. If you buy FIFA 2003 on the PS2 then Sony, the people who make the console but don't make the game, do make a profit. It's a entirely different business model - something that you've failed to appreciate.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg