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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...
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...
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.
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...
The super-expensive new cards are more for those who just have to be on the bleeding edge of technology. A $99 card will play any modern game smoothly, but it doesn't give you bragging rights with any of your videophile friends. If you're into that sort of thing.
Personally, I bought a Radeon 9200SE for $99 about 6 months ago (give or take), and it meets or exceeds the requirements of any game I've ever seen.
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
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
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.
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
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
Last year's technology of the future today!
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.
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.
Well that definately depends on what resolution you play your games on and whether or not anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering are important to you.
I play on a 19" monitor and 640x480 or 800x600 looks very jagged.
I would be interested in seeing what types of framerates you get in Doom 3 or Far Cry on a 9200SE.
I went from a 5600 Ultra to a 6800 GT and was blown away by the difference. Being able to run all of my games in 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 with AA and aniso on is awesome.
Running 1280x1024 in City of Heroes means my screen isn't cluttered with large interface elements. So the res does actually improve gameplay in some cases.
Certainly the importance of high end graphics is dependant on the individual but if all I wanted was 640x480 that Xbox might look better.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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!"
For the price of those cards, I can get a PS2 and have less to worry about.
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 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.
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
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
Two comments: First, let's compare apples to apples here. The PlayStation 2 is 5-year-old technology now. You can get a GeForce 2 for $35, and it'll push pixels just as fast as a PS2. Drop $50 for a GeForce 3 and your PC will be able to hold it's own against an XBox or Gamecube. Console graphics aren't that great, they just look a little smoother than an equivalent PC because they use "poor man's antialiasing", analog NTSC output.
Second, if 640x480 is too little resolution for you to enjoy Doom 3, it's not going to be any more fun as a console game.
0 1 - just my two bits
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
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.
Same card, and paid $70 2 years ago.. Run the Omega drivers and clock it at 275mhz. Get about 9300 of the old style 2001 3dmarks with an XP1700 running at 166mhz bus speed. Gets stuttery on some games, and I have to run Doom3 at 640x480 with all the goodies on.
My son just replaced his 8500le with a 9700pro and he is running an old k7s5a mobo with sdram and an underclocked XP2400. He just get Rome total war yesterday and it runs great at 1024x768 with all the eyecandy on.
Financially, it's a good thing to stay a generation or two behind on graphics cards. With these new cards, 9800 pros will be under $150.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
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
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.
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.
I spent a little under $400 for 6800GT. Why? I play games on a 19" monitor and prefer playing at 1024x168 or higher with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. I also wanted a video card that would last awhile. Considering that it smokes on every game out there right now, it will be viable for quite awhile.
Gaming is my hobby and I enjoy it more with good equipment. Just like any other hobby.
Can't afford it? If it matters that much to you, save or get another job or whatever. I busted ass on some freelance work to pay for my computer upgrades. Spent half my profit on upgrades and put the rest in savings.
As for your console commment. Sure go for it. It is much cheaper. Also much lower res and if you are used to mouse and keyboard then the controller is kind of lame for FPS games.
My other complaint is the there aren't a lot of good strategy games on consoles. No Civilization 3 or Rise of Nations.
I have a PS2 and a GameCube - they are good for what they are - but don't get nearly as much usage as the pcs.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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?
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. :)
I'm going to cry...last month I shelled out 150 dollars at walmart for an ATI readeon 9200 me=dumbass