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Affordable Modern Graphics Cards
EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."
My new graphics card sounds like a jet engine, and requires liquid nitrogen cooling.
If a graphics card = a mortgage payment, you're either buying one hell of a graphics card, or I want your mortgage payment!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Damn, and I just bought a Radeon 9600XT because it was cheap & available on eBay. Now I have to throw it away because new cards came out...
...yet a very large fraction.
The last video card I bought was a Radeon 9000 for $99 dollars in January.
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Of course, if you actually want to use your shiny new 6600-series card, you're gonna need to dish out the cash for a new PCI-E motherboard too. That or wait a few (more) months for an AGP version to show up.
:(
Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted that Nvidia is releasing a good quality card at a reasonable price, I realize that PCI-E allows for the very cool SLI technology, and I intend to buy one eventually, but seriously why not come out with AGP cards at the same time, my copy of DOOM3 is already starting to dusty while I wait
SINCE WHEN DID 200 DOLLAR VIDEO CARDS BECOME MIDRANGE! The top of the line should cost around 200-300, and the midranges should be in the 100-150 range, and budgets below 100. This is plain ridiculous...
Abit has x700 cards already. What I'm jazzed about today though is Vias PCIe chipset for AMD.
x700 + A64 939 + HL2 Collectors edition = Lovin!
I hope you die painfully and alone.
Almost makes you wonder if the makers of video cards are deliberately holding back on the market to make higher profits.
-- Gargonia
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
could be an affordable version of a powerful audio DSP with some of the new AVEX (audio video exchange) technology coming out, like BionicFX
I just can't. I feel like if I'm going to spend 200 bucks, it has to be the latest and the greatest, general gaming card. Which means like 400 bucks... my next problem is that I then worry about the rest of my computer. Its like if its not a totally perfect gaming rig, why bother upgrading at all. Anyone else have this problem/compulsion?
Too bad that the gfx card industry has nothing but vapor releases. Maybe in six months these cards will be available for sale.
and now Tom with the weather...
I really hope we see these sooner than usual on the Mac. I'm getting exasperated with ATI et al delaying the Mac version of their card by so long (ie: There is still no 9800XT for Mac, much less an X800). Plus, when they do come out, there's usually a $50 premium, and half the RAM. Sigh.
In addition, does anyone know if the nVidia 6600 will be DDL, thus letting people use the 30" Cinema Display? Of course, if you can afford the display, you can probably also afford the card (I can't on either count).
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Does this work? With the new generation of cards can I buy 2 cheap ones and outperform 1 of the expensive ones? What am I missing?
I've been waiting for some cards that have had about the same price/performance ratio as my GeForce 4200 had when I bought it. I'll be picking up one of these fairly soon.
~S
The bottom line is: you're still gonna get what you paid for. A Kia will get you back and forth to work. But a Caddy will do that and more... Of course, unless you really like the FPS games an all-singin' all-dancin' video card is not really needed.
In addition to that the few places that do sell these cards are in the US and they only ship to US, Canada and USFPO.
Yes but are those graphic cards compatible with a level 6 computer?
GanDuff - Finally a full-bodied Ale with the wisdom of Middle Earth and the cynicism of Springfield.
bought mine two months ago for £120 from here much better than the close to £300 when it came out...
http://www.frenchgeek.com/
the $35 cards?
Yeah, it's last year's chipset. But weren't they all the shit last year?
Aah, basking in the lagging edge of technology. Bug free and cheap games. Besides, I have a life and an airplane to build. Don't have time to camp out on the doorstep of Egames, waiting for the latest release of 'Death in the Dark, Part XXX', and then spend a week trying to get it to run so that I can say, "Ooh! Shiny things!!"
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
...if just for the fact that I'll be able to upgrade hardware on my machine whose bandwidth requirements normally demand that they be placed on the chipset.
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Almost two years back, I picked up a Radeon 8500LE for under $100. (actually, about $80) At the time, the Radeon 9700 and 9500 were top and second tier DX9 cards. The 8500 was a third-tier DX8.1 card. While it didn't have the latest features, it *was* feature-complete to the previous set.
These are good $200 cards, no doubt. But it looks to me as if the sub-$100 cards haven't made as much *relative* progress as the more expensive ones.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Still waiting for AGP version... AGP versions aren't even announced yet, only PCI Express.
Somewhere later in October or November.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
(From a rejected story I submitted)
This Inquirer story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.
Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hey I'm building a new machine I want to play counter strike source what video card should I get. Also what other hardware should i get? Any good sites to get suggestions
? Also is PCI express really better than AGP? Isn't PCI E at 1x while AGP is like 16X. Shouldn't I wait for like 8X PCI express and just get 256 Meg AGP for now? Also whats this I hear from my coworkers about "linking up" video cards to have like two cards working together? Thanks. Holla at your boy nigga! (yes I am quite black)
Econoline Crush is a Canadian rock band.
Last year's technology of the future today!
For those of us too lazy to do the research ourselves, which card has better open source drivers under X? I'm annoyed with binary-only kernel modules.
I'm not a gamer. I suppose that's why I've "survived" with my 16MB nVidia TNT (From the old Diamond Multimedia - circa 1999).
:-)
It does what I need it to do. The rest of the computer sucks, but the Video card has been just fine.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
news at 11...
If you want to stick with open source drivers (under Linux), is there anything reasonable available?
The last mainstream gaming card with open drivers, AFIAKT, was the Radeon 9100. Is that or Intel Extreme Graphics 2 a reasonable option? Is the 3D on the Matrox GXXX series even worth mentioning?
I'm just guessing here, but I don't think any (ATI or Nvidia) have "open-source" drivers...
just a guess though.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Now if the powers that be, which include Volition that own the Descent series trade mark. Agree to do a Descent 4 (snowball/hell) then I might need a new card. Right now I dont need a new card.
I thought Doom 3 was a modern game.From what I recall, owners of 9000/9200 cards cannot enjoy D3 even at 640x480 with playable fps (25-30). A resolution lower than that simply ruins the whole effort put by id Soft.
The 6600GT and X700XT are what people ready to upgrade should be looking for. It shouldn't take "too" long for the agp versions but I could always be wrong. Seeing how both ATI and nVidia made a fast card for a bargain price, I assume they'll work their ass off as fast as possible to be the first releasing the agp version and see the # of sales rise up like the tower of pizza.
At 450 dollars you can get a Radeon x800 Pro VIVO, which has a 100% chance of flashing to a full x800XT with all 16 pixel pipelines.
Or if you want an nvidia card (i.e. you have Linux and want drivers that, uh, work), the 6800GT is almost as fast and at 400 dollars, its a great deal.
The 6600 and x700s seem almost as fast as the 6800NU (300 dollars) at first, but note--they have 128-bit memory. This means that they will suffer a much larger hit when enabling antialiasing, as their memory is slower and AA requires a lot of memory bandwidth.
I don't understand how 400 dollars is too much for a card, as I can easily assemble a high-end computer for 1200-1400 dollars, like one of these:
Athlon 64 3200+ (200), Asus A78 (150), 1GB Dual Channel Corsair (300), 6800GT (400), 160GB hard drive (100), 480 watt power supply (100), case and floppy and crappy cdrom (50). That's 1300 dollars for something better than the 4000 dollar computer that Dell is offering, and as good as a 3500 dollar Alienware. So don't bitch about the price of graphics cards--you get so much for your money these days its insane.
I'll point you in the right direction Run along now.
The online hardware magazines are always reviewing and comparing the bottom-end or the high-end stuff. I like gaming occasionally like the next guy with a real life, but I will NOT shell out $400-500 for a graphics card.
I think the linked review is very helpful, because it's the kind of review that I've been looking for. I'm the target market for a review like this, and would love a step-up from my 9000 that isn't just me guessing that it will be better based on X specs. The "bang-for-buck" graphics cards always seem to get lost in the review jungle, or simply don't exist.
Its really all about the price performance ratio (at least, performance relative to the top-of-the-line card). The 6600 GT and the X700 XT provide a price/performance ratio not seen seen since the GF4 Ti4200. I'm willing to bet that between Doom 3, HL2, the amount of time since the Ti4200 came out, and the p/p ratio of these new cards, a lot of people who have Ti4200s will buy these new cards. As soon as they come out with AGP versions of course. I'm figuriing this will be my last AGP card and my last big upgrade until my next platform move next fall, which will be to a dual-core system (hopefully they're out by then!).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I didn't even try to figure out what the best card was. I knew I couldn't afford a top of the line card on my new pc, so I just said "How much extra for a 256 MB card instead of 128?". I don't even remember what card I have... I just know it was retail-boxed, runs AA and UT2004 really well, and didn't add $200 CDN to the system cost.
I suspect a *lot* of people are less concerned about "ultra-high performance" and more concerned with "price point". After all, it's the real world that matters most, and who can stop buying groceries for a month just to increase their framerate by 50%?
(Those cheap games don't suck either, but don't delve TOO far back or the bugs come back too...)
Freedom: "I won't!"
radeon 9200
For the price of those cards, I can get a PS2 and have less to worry about.
... that so-called "midrange" cars are not halfway between a Lamborghini and a Hyundai in price.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Last year $99 was the Affordable price, and probably (pure speculation) the best sellers.
So to generate more revenue, cards no longer bleeding edge are not reduced in price. Instead the newer cards are just bumped to a higher price and the original $200 sticker is now labeled 'Affordable.'
I asked this in a recent STORY... but they published it off the front page, since obviously Non-Windows users aren't a priority here at SlashDot... Oh, wait...
Anyhow, if you find any answers, let me know.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I got my Ti4600 in 2003. Although it's been great it's already showing it's age quite severely.
EQ2, forget about putting up shadows. Doom3 runs okay but by okay I mean 15 - 20FPS average (and not all the options on.)
So, if you're saying these can beat my Ti4600, then I'm not very impressed. They need to CRUSH it for me to be impressed.
Is paying $200 worth it? Spend the $400, and you'll get a card you can use for a year and a half. If you spend $200 you'll be wanting more in 6 months when new games demand more.
I got my Ti4600 when they were brand new, and it cost me. But I've been using it for a long time, which is worth it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
is how a video card can cost upwards of $400, and a processor AND motherboard that run faster and involve more R&D can cost less than that combined.
I have a 9800 Pro that I bought for $198, and I am certain that will carry me thru for another year or so until the x800 XT becomes $200, then I'll upgrade to the 'midrange' card again. I don't need bleeding edge technology -- I can suffice by lowering the quality settings to play games. If I am playing single player, I can turn up the eyecandy because FPS don't really matter, and if I'm playing online, then I turn them down to get the high FPS.
There's really no need to buy a $400 graphics card, and no need for them to cost that much. It's just for players who need the extra 5 or 10FPS when they are already in the 50 FPS range... which is damn stupid.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Yes, i am probably trolling, but I dont find this any newsworthy. Lately, I've been finding /. with too many advertisments or really what is non "News for Nerds". Maybe i'm falling out of the Nerds category and finding myself more of an angry grumpy troll.
I just wish they would switch to naming schemes that make it easier to figure out relative power within the same brand. I don't do enough gaming anymore to stay on top of the video card market. So nVidia has MX, FX, Ti, GT and who knows what else, and none of it is intuitive as to which is a later chipset or which is the budget chipset.
The problem with these graphics cards is that their native slot is PCI Express now, which means gamers have to wait an extra month or two for an AGP version. There aren't many people I know (actually, I don't think I know any at all) who have PCI Express, and the motherboards that do feature it at the moment (only Intel ones at that) aren't very good at all.
Having said that, the nVidia 6600 is a great line of cards, especially the 6600GT. The X700 is too little too late, unfortunatly, but ATI diehards will probably appreciate the middle ground they're offering. I myself was put off by ATI's lack of dynamic range, unlike nVidia, which is why I bought a nVidia 6800 (vanilla) a couple of weeks ago, and I must say, it's one hell of a card. Counter-Strike: Source and Doom 3 are smooth as butter.
Playing the demo through on one notch lower than the absolute highest quality I thought my geforce3 Ti500 seemed to work well. I noticed a couple of times when the FPS was slightly lower than perfect during the cut scenes when they've got people talking and also the guys head was slightly polygonal but overall the quality was terrific and if it wasn't perfect I couldn't tell because it was too dang dark.
Maybe I don't know what I'm missing.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
but you still can't buy these anywhere. There have been reviews of these cards for almost a month, but they are not available at any retailers.
Since you mention Volition, Descent, and damned snowballs, I'm still looking for Freespace 3
Redundancy is good And also good.
This is why I find that if you want to play games buying a console just makes sense. I know, you like the keyboard and mouse, but not having to upgrade your xbox or PS2 because a new games is out is very nice.
I can't stand paying $400 for a video card to play Doom 3. It's just not reasonable when I could buy a Platstation 2 and 5 of the latest games for that price. Because console systems are such significant loss-leaders, the only way that PCs can look as good is to either 1) sell video cards at similar losses, or 2) charge twice as much for the same thing. (1) won't happen since it isn't a monoculture: nVidia can't lose money on a video card since they don't make money from Doom 3 sales. So (2) is what happens. I'm really quite annoyed.
Who spends this kind of money on video cards? Will one of you please reply and tell me why? It's funny, because by raising the bar so high it becomes impossible for me to buy a video card unless I want to play 5 year-old games (which I often do...)
Side comment: Doom3 isn't playable at 640x480 because the text becomes unreadable, and it is an important part of the ambience of the game. So anyone with an older card who figures they can run at 640x480: don't try it.
It's not helping any. (Currently down 3.38% on the day, for you clickers of the future.)
If it's not seen as a sales improvement, what good is it technologically?
is over 100 million on the new geforce cards. that is more than all P4 cpu's, except the p4ee which is 80% cache transistors. so start whining and bitching about cpu prices if you are gonna whine about gpu prices
I just upgraded my gaming rig to an AMD 64 with an FX5700 256MB AGP card. This, coming from an Athlon XP 2600 with a 5200 128MB AGP card, and I can say that it was worth the money for the performance of the card in combination with the Motherboard upgrade. The graphics have noticably improved, and I can run HIGH resolution mode in all games. However, this only involved game settings, and some minor changes. For the $99.00 I paid for the 5700, I find it to be well worth the price. When the 6x00 series hits the $99.00 mark, I will have to start looking at a replacement....but that won't be for another 6 - 12 months. I don't need Bleeding Edge performance. Not at 4 times the cost anyway.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Shit. Ya'll have not seen my mortgage payment! I could buy a couple GeForce XG9000 Ultra Supers for one dirty little house payment.
House = Under a Bridge
The ATI Radeon 9000 (and probably 9200 by now) are AGP cards under $100. They perform quite well under Fedora Core 1 and 2 (I'm guessing under the test releases for 3 as well) and you can play 3D games with them (Tux Racer, bzflag, Neverball, and Neverputt all work perfectly). It's also plug-and-play -- no hassles and no proprietary drivers needed to get a reasonably good video card at a cheap price. Just power down, plug it in, boot back up, and watch the autodetection go to work. I'm guessing other free software OSes have comparable experiences with this hardware.
Digital Citizen
It's possible to get Doom 3 playing fairly decently on very modest hardware. On my setup:
I then bought an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro based on performance/price advice (thanks be to AnandTech) for £70.98 (~$128.04, plus we're ripped off here in the UK), and I'm now getting ~30 fps benchmark averages on higher settings, with a modest overclock (ATITool be praised). In-game is jumping between ~20-60 fps. Looks like I'm a bit CPU-bound here from here on though.
I may be old fashioned, but how is the 2D quality in these new cards ? (and is there a brand that make higher qaulity cards with Nvidia/Ati, chips than others) - I am running on an old fashioned Matrox G550 with dual dvi, and I really want to change for somthing better, but dual dvi and 2D image quality seams not to be tested any more, only 3D stuff.
I understand that a lot of the stuff under the hood is NDA'ed for reasons of competitiveness. However, do they have any other reason for not showing us the code? Do they think that we're just going to fuck everything up? Do they have dirty little secrets under the hood (benchmark optimizing notwithstanding)?
A top end motherboard and processor will set you back nearly a thousand dollars on some lines.
That is the comparison you should be making.
That $198 9800 Pro is akin to buying a 2400Athlon and NForce2 board.
Buy a M64 3500+ and a good motherboard and the comparisons start to make more sense with the high end video cards.
Oh, those high end video cards have more transitors than most processors. Hence I am not sure which one requires more R&D or better know how.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
dude, i play Sopwith2 at 320x200 and get AWESOME framerates! I am kickin' ASS at that game
Needless to say, I am quite pleased with my decision to wait a little bit.
As a matter of fact, I didn't pick up and play Half-Life (the standalone version) until 2 years ago. I can hear the gamers recoiling in horror now. You know what though? The game was still awesome. When I got stuck, a quick search on the net would offer help. After I finished the game, I was able to download and play some cool "unofficial" mods. Got the game cheap, still enjoyed the hell out of it, and the hardware requirements to play it were not a problem at all.
Needless to say, I don't plan on buying up any more games when they first come out. I apply the same philosophy to movies as well, and it has worked out. If I want to see something, it really doesn't matter to me how soon I see it. We seem to have really been suckered into this "consumerism" mindset. Instead of buying a CD within the first two weeks of its release, before they jack the prices up, I'll just wait until it shows up in the used CD stores.
I am glad that there are some people out there who gobble up the latest and greatest stuff, because it drives the prices down on all the "obsolete" stuff for guys like me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Shelling out $500 CDN last year around this time for a ati 9800 pro thats probably not even half as good as these $200 USD cards.
These new cards should come packaged with a flashlight (batteries not included) if Doom 3 is going to be the new fait accompli benchmark for video cards...
For just about any single piece of hardware.
I'll go a bit over that if I need to, but that's my target price range.
I paid $109 for my DVD Burner. I paid like $208 for my Processor + Mobo(In my mind about $104 for each of them). I paid about $150 for my HDD.
I got my GeForce 4MX for about $25. I'll probably be getting a new video card some time next year, but whatever I can get in the $100 range is what I'll get. These things depreciate so rapidly, I can't justify spending $200 for a video card.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
doom 3 was a real disappointment
i bought it the day it came out, hoping for gaming goodness...well, i've just now uninstalled it because it was a waste of harddrive space. hell, i havent even beaten it, its just too boring. it's pretty damn cool at first and all, but after you walk into yet another dark room searching for yet another pda you start thinking to yourself "gee, i wonder what's going to jump out of a sliding panel *this* time" you'd be better off with far cry or something
Be careful with how far you extend that metaphor.
I have a Cadillac and fucking thing always has something wrong with it. My brother has a Cadillac and something's always wrong with it too.
Oh, broken headlight? "That's $240 plus taxes."
We hate our Cadillacs.
2 complete playstation 2's.... Do proper comparisions before you make such silly statements.
Hate to break it to you, but some AC on Slashdot doesn't decide what "should" be with bussiness. Their cost is determined by two things:
1) What the market will pay.
2) To a much greater extent, what it costs to make.
It is EXPENSIVE to make those high end cards that push the limit. As time goes on their technology is refined and trickles down. The midrange and low end exist precisely because the high end exists.
Also this is nothing new. $500-$600 has always been the high end price AFAIK. When I first heard about 3d accelerators for consumers, the high end was the Voodoo 2, speicifcally 2 12MB Voodoo 2s SLI'd together. Well guess what? Each one was about $300, giving a total of $600.
But the thing is you don't need the high end to play games. It's there for those that want to spend teh scratch to have the latest greatest. I have a 9800 Pro, which is slower than either of these two cards here. There is no game I've encountered to date, including Doom 3 and FarCry, that isn't palyable on it. For that matter there's no game I've yet encountered that doesn't run quite well on it. Doom 3 runs nice at 1024x768 at high detail, FarCry likewise with most things at very high detail.
Now it doesn't run as good as my friend's 6800 Ultra. He can run them at higher resolutions, with more features like anti-aliasing, and at higher frame rates. However it's not like his $500 card is the minimum to make it work, it is the current best. My older, now low midrange card works fine.
And budget cards can work. You can get a 9600 Pro for around $100-$120 and that will run all games today. Again, you'll have to scale back the detail some more, but they'll still eb perfectly playable, and even look pretty good.
So get off the "There's no reason for the high end" kick. Sure there is: People want it and the technology eventually comes to the rest of us. DVD players did not start out costing $50, they costed $3000. As the technology matured and production went up, costs came down. Graphics cards are the same, but in a perpetual cycle.
In 1988, my computer was an Apple IIGS. It did 320x200 at 256 colours, and had no acceleration. My computer now does over 16 million colours at resolutions in excess of HDTV, and has a massive 3d acceleration subsystem that can render millions of triangles per second.
They both cost about the same amount of money.
This is the reason why modern games are starting to belon in gaming consoles. There, game programmers are targeting the plattform instead of programming and then hoping that HW will catch up. Particularly, I prefer a console that costs less than the video card I'm suppossed to buy to be able to run SuperDuper1stPersonKilla V1.0
I'm buying a new graphics card to replace my geforce3 ti200, not because of Doom3, but because of xorg 6.8! I'm digging all the new 'candy' features, and want to have my desktop be more responsive. What is the best 'affordable' 2d/desktop card that'll do all that 6.8 does now?
LCKBVC(
free ipod and free gmail!
That's some expensive lifestyle there...Nifty until your job gets outsourced or your urban area becomes a target for a massive attack, no matter who's doing the attacking or who the government claims is doing ther attacking. No idea what your resale value might be then.....
Lived heavy urban for a long time, I'll pass now. The sounds of sirens at 3 am every night I don't miss. Crime-pass, riots-pass, wall to wall yuppies or street hustlers-double pass.
I live now where the water and food come from, not where they get delivered-to, seems more prudent. In fact, going to go outside after I post this and go to the backyard "deli" and get a lot of fresh picked organic food.
And I don't have a mortgage now, used to, now I get paid to live here. Granted, small house, but it's functional and big enough. Only thing I lack is broadband, but when you consider everything else, it's easy to put up with dialup. Don't like movies anymore, eating in restaurants lost it's appeal a long time ago once hepatits A hit hard, and don't need to go out looking to meet girls, got that covered too. I "commute" a few miles a day working, but never leave the property or drive on a public road.
Like the folks say, different strokes!
I read slashdot. I game... However the game I play with the greatest graphics demands is "Internet Reversi"--an 8x8 ascii matrix would suffice. Where's my graphics card? When I added a new machine I had to search far and wide to buy a $30 graphics card WITHOUT AN ANNOYINGLY LOUD FAN!!! (Actually without any fan whatsoever... It seems these items are a disappearing breed...
Not to mention $400!!
No thanks, my penis is large enough.
They're both closed source drivers and both will "taint" you kernel. Right now nVidia has the better Linux drivers by a mile, but ATI seems commited to changing that in the face of some rather large letter writing campaigns etc.
If you want open source I believe the last open source video card drivers were an old release for the Radeon 9200, at that time period ATI was releasing it's specs and working closely with the Linux community. They may get brave and do so again, but I'm not holding my breath.
I have a Radeon 9800 Pro running under Libranet Linux (free trial http://www.libranet.com/trial_download.html).
Those gasping on 500$ high-end cards - you should note that you can't BUY EM anywhere. 6800GTs, X800 XTs and 6800 Ultras are still constantly out of stock. Yes, if you dont care about warranties or the exact brand, you can probably find some model somewhere, but if you want, say, a certain model, its more likely than not that it's out of stock everywhere.
So, if 500$ is too much for a videocard, why these things seem to be selling like hotcakes? Maybe the average slashdot crowd is so out of touch with their uber P200Mhz MMX linux boxes that they haven't noticed how the technology has advanced.
Yes, I do admit the manufacturing runs are somewhat small on the high end models, but at the same time I think that the manufacturers were caught off-guard on how popular the new nVidia offering would turn out to be. At the same time ATI seems to have problems manufacturing enough working X800 XT chips - X800pros are commonly available, but the faster XT models are still rare as hell.
And, newsflash, that latest chip in that 6800GT trounces P4 in complexity and transistor count, and it takes immense amounts of cash to develop these things. And unlike intel, they can't shift bazillion of them to businesses buying by the thousands while upgrading huge piles of desktops. So, obiviously, they are going to skim the profit from somewhere. High end buyers are funding those 200$ cheap-o-cards. Midrange stuff costs pretty much what it costs to manufacture one of these, and the development costs are covered by the high end models.
For those penny-pinchers who outright can't afford the latest stuff - it's STILL amazing how impressive cards you can get at 50$ today. Radeon 9200 is comparable to GeForce 3 - a card that totally dominated only about three years ago. When you count out the cost of the memory chips on the card, the actual graphics chip turns out to be damn cheap.
Which also explains the general upward trend in graphics card prices - the next gen stuff is commonly shipped with 256MB onboard memory, compared to last year's 128MB. And that's GDDR3 on the high end models - expensive, difficult to obtain...
I imagine those pushing $200-300 = lowend and $400-500 = good deal are either paid to do so or the easily manipulated(teenagers and others with non-fully formed minds).
A couple of big issues are being missed in the price point discussion.
First, there are essentially no games out there that tax a high end card. Even games like Doom 3 run light lightning with a 128MB Radeon 9800. The high and ultra quality settings scraping for improvements, like not compressing normal and specular maps, things that buy you almost nothing in exchange for massive bandwidth requirements. So all of these people clamoring for X800s and all that...there's no need, not yet.
Second, a minority of PC owners run 3D games or otherwise need 3D acceleration. Partially this is because of compatibility and driver issues--and how those issues don't exist on consoles (cue the guy who always brings up RTS games as a counterargument)--but it's also partially because it's hard for the average person to know which games will work. DirectX 9? Pixel Shader 2.0? Video memory? Most people don't know anything about this. They buy a game, it doesn't work, they can't return it, and then they buy an Xbox for less than the price of a video card.
Third, the fragmentation and wide variations in the PC market result in all but a handful of game developers shooting for the high-end. Heck, over half of all PCs sold are notebooks. Is the 15% of the *gamer* market that owns X800s a viable target? Wouldn't it be better to tone things down and run on a wider variety of cards? Sure, you can write a game to scale based on the hardware it is running on, but this is expensive and time consuming.
In a lot of ways, the whole PC video card market is thriving on a sizable group of people--though still a minority--who upgrade obsessively.
are the numbers of those who are so easily manipulated. My question is has it always been this way or is the number of brain dead rising?
Sheesh, it's just $200 folks. That's like going out on a date for dinner and movie for 2 Fridays. Surely you can give up going out with a girl for two weeks to get this card. Oh wait, who am I kidding? This is /. We never go on dates anyways... :P
For that reason, I have no problems with it, because stupid people with money are dangerous; just look at the Bush administration.
ATI's drivers are, without a doubt, the WORST quality party of my Linux system. They are SOOOOOOOOOOOO bad. Honestly. The latest drivers are a decent step backwards - there are now horrible rendering bugs in most apps. And of course since it's an R350, the DRI drivers don't support it ( yet, but work is progressing to reverse-engineer it ).
But for people who want a video card for running anything 3D under Linux, you really only have 1 option: nVidia. If you choose ATI, you WILL be sorry.
To think that Karateka ran VERY WELL on machines with 64k DRAM (UMA, frame buffer only) and 1MHz 8 bit processor really boggles the mind. Kind of makes one wonder what the minimum system requirement for a remake would be...?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
no, what they have is licensed 3rd party IP all over their code on top of what they wouldn't even show up at gunpoint ;)
Because golf clubs will occasionally get you out of the basement? Seriously, I game too (I plan on spending the evening honoring up in America's Army), it's fun, but all this obsessive fascination with framerates well above the human visual threshold, and debating different benchmarks, and getting the latest new thing reminds me of... "ricers". And I KNOW you all are smarter than that. Gamers shit turds that are smarter than your average ricer.
Freedom: "I won't!"
But for those of us who like to balance performance with noise how do these modern midrange cards rate? I went with a Radeon 9600XT not so long ago due to its reduced heat output and quieter fan. What good are the nice speakers if they are drowned out by the "leaf blower". :-)
You don't use the advantages of the city, just a thought that you could, and paying $3000 rent, easily $1000 more in taxes, smaller place, poorer air quality, .. that's a lot of expense and reduced living conditions for just a thought. Could I interest you in a 'good deal' on a video card for just $500?;)
I'm running an ASUS AGP-V6800. 4.5 years old. My first thought: tech has come so far that it's looped back on itself!!
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
I'll take the video card, thanks.
PARKING in my building alone is $350/mo
I wish that my housing only dinged me for $350. heh.
Maybe someone can toss me a clue here, but with all these transistors why aren't these things producing much heat? My athlon has a chunky sized heatsink with a fan attached but my ATI 9800 PRO card has a teeny, tiny fan with a thin heatsink. My geforce cards all had small fans. Are there less resistors in GPUs? Does the lower clockspeed allow for GPUs to run cooler?
Look for bargains (or have a contact at an outlet store).
I was looking for a new graphics card to replace my near 5 year old Matrox G400 Max. I was planning on spending about 175 on a Matrox P750. I think that is an ok price for a piece of hardware that I will use for a few years.
Well, my friend that works in a FedEx outlet store (the place all those lost and damaged packages go) told me that they had recieved a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB card.
They were selling it for 50% retail price. It retails at about $290 before tax (cheaper if you purchase the low-cost brands). I got mine for ~$165.00.
Now I have a gaming card in a primarily non-gaming machine. Before, I could barely play NeverWinter Nights at 800x600 at low detail. Now, I can play it at 1600x1200 on max detail. I'm a happy camper.
ThetaPi.
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
or who here in Southern California (or California in general for that matter) has ever seen a consumer graphics card worth *MORE* than their mortgage.. I would be shocked..
That's starting to be 1/3 the price of a computer.
Speak for yourself. That's 90% the cost of a computer I'd put together...
(Decided the 939pin Athlon64s were overpriced. So I went quiet/low power instead.)
As egregious the current prices of video cards, its the need for active cooling that makes SOTA video cards unacceptable for me.
So, I go blow $75 on an ATI 9550 card. Yeah, looks like I won't be playing FarCry or Doom 3 anytime soon. Even worse, it turns out even though its an AGP card, my cheapo piece of crap mobo can't drive the card. (Little caveat for you casual PC builders...) *sigh*
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
What's interesting about this is not just that it's faster than the older generation.
First, the 6800 GT/Ultra gave twice the performance of the previous, similarly-priced generation. That's a lot larger jump than we've seen in quite some time.
Now, add on the fact that these $200 cards are very nearly as fast as the 6800's. That means that comparing these to even the cream-of-the-crop, $400 cards of the last generation, you're getting far more performance at only half of the price.
This really is the largest jump in the performance:cost ratio that we've seen in a long time.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I don't live in the basement and I do get out. In fact being employed full time and having two kids doesn't give me that much time for gaming. Gaming is to me what TV is for majority of the population. I don't watch TV, I game. So I spend as much on a video card as someone else might on a TV ($500 doesn't even get you that much of a TV).
On the far end of the scale - you do have some people who take it to the extreme. Look this card does 3 fps better in Doom 3 so I'll pay extra to get it. That's a bit silly. But obsession is always kind of insane. Train since you are 5 years old for that one shot at the gold medal for curling?
Your analogy to ricers is apt and is the same as for any tinkering hobby. No matter how silly it may be squeezing that last drop of power out is part of the hobby. Just as much as modifying the look.
As for faster refresh rates than the eye can see - all I'm aiming for is 60. I can SEE the 60hz refresh rate on a desktop and it bugs the crap out of me.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
ATi and nVidia are at eachother's throats continually. They can't really afford to screw consumers since the other will take advantage. They are always about who can get the fastest, cheapest, etc. They are both "brand names" like Nike.
Kinda like AMD and Intel. Intel chips used to basically be a what the market would bear kind of thing. They released faster ones as they felt like it. Then the Athlon came out and Intel ramped up speeds and slashed prices in a hurry. They can't afford not to, or AMD will step in with both feet.
In .au, a X700 costs around $450. I'm stuck with a Riva128 on my Linux Box and a Radeon 9200SE on my new system :(.
"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - unknown
ATI's lack of support for Linux is appalling, what with over 16000 signatures on the ATI Linux driver petition. They still don't have drivers for XF86 4.4
And they don't work with the new X.org, and I'm not hopeful about the future. I'm building a friend a budget computer and he wants an awesome video card, so I shall say goodbye to my Awesome-in-Theory 9800 Pro, and get a GeForce FX 5200 and MX 4000 with the money I get from it.
Really, don't buy ATI cards. If you ever have a problem, they won't care
Please stop stalking me, bro.
"
1) What the market will pay.
2) To a much greater extent, what it costs to make.
"
no price is determinned by what the market will pay.
If your product costs 200 dollars to make, and it's only worth 50 dollars, you go out of business.
Your cost to make an item doesn't really matter to the consumer.
if nobosy would by a 500 dolar video card, ther ewouldn't be any. If that meant no RnD for new products, then they would stagnate. Until a hungry competitor showed up and built some new technology out of a garage somewhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I purchased a ATI 9200SE card for $80 canadian just one month ago - works well in linux, and no problems with the opensource drivers - perhaps a few small tweaks in XF86Config-4 if you want GL or any sort of 3D, but all this can be found easily on google.
128M is enough for me to do any sort of applications, and is suitable for all my N64 emulator games, tuxracer, etc.
One thing though, is that the card is AGP8x, but X is only able to support up to 4x for all cards.
my blog
As a rule of thumb, I try not to spend over $200 - $250 on a graphics card. 8 months down the line, the chances are your card will have gone down drastically in price, leaving you feel foolish.
I currently own a PNY Geforce 4 TI 4200 64 MB. I bought it when it was a fairly new product, and it cost me only $130. Years later, I can still run ut2004 at 1280 x 1024, with very playable framerates.
The 6600 GT looks like a great card... it has all the features of the 6800, only with less pipelines. Don't tell me that it "stunts the performance". If you saw a card for $750 that had 32 pipes, would you buy it?
Don't be stupid, get your cards cheap. :)
OK suggestion for an office video card. But what low-end video card would you recommend for TV output?
no price is determinned by what the market will pay
This is the reason why modern games are starting to [belong] in gaming consoles.
Where can I get legitimate user-created mods for console games?
I'm going to cry...last month I shelled out 150 dollars at walmart for an ATI readeon 9200 me=dumbass
Subject says it all.
Eye candy sells. A fun game with good graphics will outsell a fun game with not as good graphics. An OK game with good graphics will sell while that same game with OK graphics will not.
Each new generation of 3D game graphics really does immerse one more deeply into the game. I catch myself ducking and dodging while playing Far Cry, or stopping and staring at a tropical bird.
Of course, if you want to use AMD, or want to play newer eye-candy-filled games like Doom3, my advice cannot help you.
pigcops will be so much scarier with this nifty new tech- i bet they'll be %1110 awesomer than before!!! I bet when DNF comes out, I'll buy even more frankly redundant hardware and crank real money into a pathetic gameworld experience! maybe, if i'm reaallly smart, I'l have zippy headphones to augment my savagely antisocial lifestyle choice... wait - DNF is coming out, right?
Well, I personally spend much less than that on hardware, but if it's your hobby and entertainment, I really don't see why so many people have a problem with it. Meanwhile, I know people who think nothing of an $100/month cable bill (gotta have all the premium channels, you know). That's $1,200/year for cable television!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
but my geforce 4 ti4400 doesn't desperately need replacement just yet, it can probably cope for another 6 months or so. I'll be sure to pick up one of those when they drop to around 100 bucks tho :)
And besides, you know what they say. You can get the best videocard around but if the other parts in your sys are crap then you'll be held back by those anyway.
I'm currently the owner of an nvidia geforce4 ti4400 and i bought it around may 2002 and it can still run today's games quite decent. The only hickup are happening with doom3 now and than, but this is actually the first game that i had to put on low settings to get a decent 40-60 fps. All other games never gave a hickup at medium or high quality/resolution settings. The only thing that might lack is some good AA. The card i had before this was a geforce 1 sdr. It just got a bit cheaper at the date of purchase because the ddr version was released. I had this card for at least 2 years as well. In this period most of my friends have gone through several more "midrange" cards, like a tnt2, gf2mx, ati radeon 8500, radeon 9600. So in the end they come up spending just as much money as me if not more. So it doesn't really matter that much what your strategy is. Either you buy an expensive card which might last longer, or you buy a midrange card every 8 months or so. But be serious, you play a game because you like the gameplay, and not because it looks funky. I still have a lot of fun with quake3 and all settings set to 16bit and such. It looks ridiculous, but plays like a charm. I even have more fun playing wacky wheels in dosbox than playing certain games that look marvelous.
The truth is that is embarrassing! I just switched my ATI 9800 Pro for the NVidia 6800 GT. Low and behold, my 9800 Pro performs *way* better in City of Heroes and The Sims 2 than the 6800GT! No, it is not a joke. I easily run 1280 * 1024, all default settings, in CoH on my ATI, but with 6800 GT I have to pull particle -depth is it?--down to half of the default and run at 1152 * 964--and I still don't have the same perf as with the 9800 Pro! Granted, Doom 3 and Far Cry run a lot better on the NVidia 6800GT than on the 9800 Pro, but, still, I thought that Open GL was the big advantage of the NVidia? The real problem starts when a lot of "spells" happen at the same time (in City of Heroes, that is). By spells I mean a lot of super-power particle effects.. No matter what, I'm NOT impressed with the GT. I read Hard OCP's review, but I can't believe that they missed out on this; I don't know what the ATI X800 is like, but I can only imagine that it is waaaaay better than NVidia as far as City of Heroes goes....
I reserve myself of flaming retards.. I'm only posting my own experience.
The rest of my machine is as follows..
3.0@800 P4 CPU (OC to 3.4, and no, it's better than leaving @3.0)
1GB 3400 RAM
ASUS P4 800 Deluxe MB
2*80GB striped SATA drives (and don't tell me this matters, I have SCSI as well, but it doesn't make enough of a difference for my game machine except for load times).
My last TV lasted 13 years, finally broke down last year. How long does a graphics card last you?
Lalala
can you just say - XBOX!
use that for gaming and save on video cards for years to come...
Look, mods, I have recently made a comment which was flamebait, but it wasn't this one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well every graphics card I have purchased since 1996 is still in use in a computer system.
Not as my primary, but as the kids and secondary test box.
Sometimes my arms bend back.