Forget Expensive Video Cards

Anonymous Reader writes "Apparently, the $200 in video cards does not produce the difference. While $500 video cards steal the spotlight on review sites and offer the best performance possible for a single gpu, most enthusiasts find the $300 range to be a good balance between price and performance. Today TechArray took a look at the ATI x1900xtx and Nvidia 7900gtx along with the ATI x1800xt and Nvidia 7900gt."

Comments

Forget expensive English lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

You apparently don't need them to get your submissions approved.

Re:Forget expensive English lessons

[Zeussy]

Someone set us up the graphics card.

Re:Forget expensive English lessons

[Kagura]

And apparently a two-page benchmark is good enough for a slashdot frontpage article?! Why don't you try REAL benchmark for the X1900 XTX, which also shows off two flavors of the X1800, and two other flavors of the NVidia GeForce 7800.

Not directly related to TFA

[remembertomorrow]

But I will not even consider purchasing an ATI card until they get their Linux compatibility (drivers) up to snuff.

I'd rather not be locked to one platform because of a piece of hardware.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Timesprout]

I'm sure ATI engineers are rushing back to the office as I type this to work on Linux compatability. That or making mental notes to give the boss an earfull on monday morning about dropping linux compatability altogether since its not appreciated or increasing revenue.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

That or making mental notes to give the boss an earfull on monday morning about dropping linux compatability altogether since its not appreciated or increasing revenue

And thus completely lose out on the rendering farms that use linux machines. His boss will be very happy he has a smart employee when they both lose their jobs.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty presumptuous of you to assume that Linux has a total of two 3D games, both of them FPSes. You're the idiot, and a bigot to boot. Go back to playing that flight sim in MS Excel on your Intel Extreme Graphics.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[nstlgc]

Personally, I'd rather not give up technological advantage because of some crappy hippie OS. Oops, did I say that on Slashdot?

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[ScrewMaster]

Render farms don't need or have video on each processor ... you just have thousands of machines in racks processing data streams. The resulting output files are then taken and rendered to video or film. Besides, the number of systems in all the world's render farms is a tiny fraction of the number of chipsets ATI sells to the notebook and desktop markets. When Linux makes significant inroads into those markets ATI will follow suit. What you're reallying complaining about is the fact ATI is making no particular effort to develop that market by supplying video drivers in a format that you find acceptable. And there's no particular reason that they should unless their own analysis says that it will be profitable. Companies get to choose where they put their development dollars. Now, if there was some proof that, say, Microsoft was paying off or pressuring ATI to keep their Linux drivers on the back burner, that might be different.

On the other hand, ATI has never been particularly good about drivers, even under Windows, so don't expect them to be much help in the Linux world either. That stupid-ass .Net-based "Catalyst Control Panel" they've been shipping for a while now is just obnoxious.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Then don't buy an nVidia card. nVidia's binary x86 drivers may be better than ATi's, but if you happen to use another platform, you're stuck with the open source drivers. The open source drivers for nVidia cards plainly suck.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[heinousjay]

There's no need to be presumptuous - the gaming choices in Windows are vastly more plentiful, and the performance is higher. It's what those of us who participate call a 'win-win.' Go ahead and be morally superior (haha) but realize that sometimes that comes with a price.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[It'sYerMam]

Having talked personally with the ATi linux team (back before I bought an nVidia) I know they do try with the resources they're given by the management. They also take into account the complaints of the users - although, being bound by NDA, I'm pretty sure they can't give out "coming soon" notices. Certainly, way back when there was this nasty problem with UT2k4 and the ATi linux drivers, they wouldn't disclose that it was fixed before they released.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[TheRaven64]

Render farms don't need or have video on each processor ... you just have thousands of machines in racks processing data streams.

Actually, that's not quite true these days. A modern render farm has a GPU (or two) in each node, and uses it for all sorts of things. If you are only doing relatively low-quality renderings, you can use something like Chromium and get high framerate, enormous images rendered through OpenGL. If you are doing ray tracing, you can speed this up hugely using the GPU.

Even volume rendering runs on the GPU these days. You can split an enormous volume into 256^3 cubes, render these quickly on an large array of GPUs and then composite the individual rays using the alpha blending hardware on a smaller array of machines in a tree configuration until you have the final image[1].

So, no, not every node needs a video output capability, but if you want state-of-the-art performance they do all need at least one GPU.

[1] Some people are using other kinds of stream processor for this step these days, but that's still a relatively young research area.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[HaDAk]

ati's drivers are crap no matter what os you're using. i much prefer forceware.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather not be locked to one platform because of a piece of hardware.

That's why I like to program on my abacus I made at home with some two liter caps. / you're a dorkus

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you better crack open the piggy bank..

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=31009

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Ohreally_factor]

That's interesting info. I guess my knowledge is a few years out of date. I was under the impression that individual units in a render farm ran headless, and the whole idea was to use masses of cheap commodity hardware to do the heavy crunching.

What you're saying does make sense, though. GPUs are just slightly more expensive cheap commodity hardware. =) And if it will cut down on render times while not raising costs by several orders of magnitude, it seems like a no brainer. Shorter render times = pushing more projects through = more money.

Do you know which cards are commonly used? Are they $500 gaming cards? Cheaper gaming cards? More specialized cards?

Also, I'd imagine that the really big post houses (with the state of the art farms you of which you speak) have access to driver source code, so they can create and optimize their own drivers. If this is the case, they probably can't or wouldn't want to (if they could) release these drivers. I'm just guessing. If you have more info, I'd love to hear it!

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Nazo-San]

Well, I do disagree with the claim that it locks you into windows. The fact is, the number of games for linux IS pitiful. I'm sorry, but, I'm afraid this is fact. This statement is coming from someone who has used both ATI and nVidia video cards. There's a lot more to benefit from than terminals though. Proper video acceleration actually helps a lot for many 2D effects expected in a modern GUI such as transparencies and, more importantly, video. Unfortunately, linux still completely lacks truly GPU accelerated video processing of the more important effects like deinterlacing. As far as I know, you still can't do any more than a quick and dirty bilinear resize via video hardware, but, you really don't need much CPU power to do a much higher quality resize anyway.

Personally, I've had both nVidia and ATI hardware over the years, and I'm still more than a little dissapointed at the uphill battle one has to fight to get an ATI card to perform better than an old PCI video card at simple tasks in linux (and I'm not making that claim up either considering that when my primary AGP card failed I was forced to result to an ancient Rage Pro based PCI card which only pretended at 3D acceleration when it was new and even then couldn't really compete that well.) I don't even bother to play games in linux, I just want video processing and the desktop to get what they can out of my video card in Windows. And I'm very dissapointed that even after all these years ATI still refuses to give us something as easy to install and use as what nVidia gives us, but, don't get me wrong, nVidia still also refuses to give more than a basic support. I still can't understand what trade secrets both companies are afraid of giving away by just giving third parties the information they need to develop the drivers that neither company can put any serious development into. All they have to do is release the right info and ATI cards could perform only slightly worse than nVidia cards in linux (nVidia is better at OpenGL, and, surprisingly enough, linux tends to focus more on OpenGL than Direct3D for some reason. ATI is still decent at OpenGL, though you'd never be able to tell with the way they perform in linux.)

Locked in though? Well, there's always the framebuffer method, vidix, and so on. You get poor performance out of a number of things, but, its enough to get by. Definitely you aren't locked into windows with ATI. Unfortunately, games do lock you into windows whether you are using ATI or nVidia. The fact is, only one line of truly popular games has consistantly offered linux support, and for the greater majority of the rest, you will either only see linux support considerably later or you'll get inconsistant results at best from either what usually is a poor linux port, or if you don't even get that, MAYBE you'll get acceptable results out of Cedega, though for most of us this has been even less consistant. Again, this is coming from someone who has used windows and linux both over the years as well as ati and nvidia. I can still remember how even an OpenGL based game like Neverwinter Nights ran worse in linux versus windows even on my old unlocked and overclocked (via BIOS, so both the unlocking and overclocking applied to linux as well as windows) 6800... I never got Doom 3 up and running, so maybe someone can tell me if it did worse or not, but, I'd really suspect that it actually would be just a little bit worse in linux like NWN was.

There's still always dual booting I guess.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[TheRaven64]

Do you know which cards are commonly used? Are they $500 gaming cards? Cheaper gaming cards? More specialized cards?

As with everything else in a cluster, it's usually whichever has the best price:performance ratio. I'm more familiar with the ones that exist in academia, and these tend to be 'whatever the fastest that we could afford when the cluster was built.' An average cluster node costs around £2000 and upwards. They usually have at least two CPUs, a couple of GBs of RAM (minimum). The less cheap ones will have a high-speed interconnect, adding £500-£1000 to the price of a node (plus more expensive switches), while the cheap ones will just use gigabit ethernet. Adding a £200 GPU adds 5-10% to the cost of the node, while giving up to around a 500% performance increase in many tasks.

Usually they don't need access to the driver code. On *NIX (excluding IRIX) they tend to just run an X server on a display that's not connected to anything and run shader programs on it. The limitation of this is that only one program/user can typically access the GPU at once, but that's usually what's wanted. The shader program receives data from the interconnect, processes it, and passes it on.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[thepotoo]

someone please, PLEASE, tell me why no one likes ATI in Linux?

I have used the ATI out-of-the-box radeon drivers in SuSE, it was pretty much as easy to install as it was in windows. And UT2004 (the only linux game I own) seemed to run just as well as it did in Windows.

So what am I missing that everyone hates so much?

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[SillyNickName4me]

xv can also do motion compensation and colorspace conversion.

the scaling is usually better done with opengl anyway.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[SillyNickName4me]

If you happen to run Suse or redhat workstation or some others, then the ati drivers usually install and work without a problem. If you run anything else, you are basicly out of luck.

The nvidia drivers may be a bit more difficult to install but at least they work on about any linux distribution that runs on x86.

That said, things are starting to look better for rv300 based cards, tho incomplete, there is some hardware 3d acceleration with open source drivers possible now.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[narfbot]

You're using the open source drivers. They work far better. People buying the newest cards have to stick with ATI closed source driver. It simply doesn't work on my machine, and for far too many people. That is why people say to buy Nvidia if you are going to buy a new video card.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[thepotoo]

No, I think I'm using the proprietary drivers.
They are called, from ati.com, ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Drivers for XFREE86 / X. Org Version 8.24.8
And they seem to work fine to me, although an above poster said they only work on some distros. Next time I screw something up and need to reformat, I will try the drivers on Kubuntu, and see what happens.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Trejkaz]

Many of us were around when Doom 3 came out on Linux, and suffered ATI's drivers at that point in time.

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Ohreally_factor]

Thanks for the mini-lesson! You rule!

Re:Not directly related to TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you benchmarked your card and then tried the same under Windows? You will notice the ATI Linux drivers fall FAR short of the Window ones. The gap in performance is unacceptable. The Nvidia drivers perform similar under both platforms. It doesn't make sense to buy a $300 ATI card when you can get the same performance with a $200 Nvidia card under Linux.

And as far as ease of use goes, the Nvidia ones are much easier to work with. But if the performance was there, I would personally be willing to deal with the ATI drivers if an ATI card was the best value. But they are not. ATI isn't a choice if you are a Linux user.

Whatever...

[Kjella]

I'm sure the $500 GFX cards only exist to make spending $300 on a single component of a computer seem reasonable.

Re:Whatever...

[raz0]

Actually most every new game today is GPU bound, so naturally the absolute most significant performace boost will be from the graphics card. I used to think the same way as you do, but you will gain MUCH more performace by getting a low end CPU, motherboard, RAM and then spending most your budget on the graphics card.

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, some people buy complete computers for half that.

Re:Whatever...

[X43B]

"I'm sure the $500 GFX cards only exist to make spending $300 on a single component of a computer seem reasonable."

I'm sure you are probably joking but I think you nailed it on the head. Having a super expensive card, even if it is a low seller, has many positive benefits.

1) You will sell some to those who want to be ub3r133t
2) You get the publicity of being "the best" even if no one actually buys the best
3) Perhaps most importantly, the "Wendy's Effect". It is oft quoted that no one buys Wendy's triple cheeseburger. Someone at Wendy's decided that offering it was a waste so they removed it. However, this almost immediately reduced the number of double cheeseburgers sold. Apparently when people see that there is something more expensive and more "over the top" they are much more compelled to buy the next lower version than if that same version was the high end.

Re:Whatever...

[ivan256]

The write the games for the hardware that is out there. If the GPU sales strategy didn't work, you'd see more games for lower powered cards, not more people with machines that can't handle modern games.

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually most games are not gpu bound anymore with the new 7900 gt SLI and x1900XT.
even less gpu bound with the quad sli ones.

Re:Whatever...

[coaxeus]

too bad windows vista is GPU bound :) http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id= 6

Re:Whatever...

[Tyrant Chang]

To add little more to your post, I think the term is compromise effect: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=127302 9 (or also known extreme aversion effect). People will generally choose a midpoint of an option set and framing an option as a middle makes it more attractive.

Apparently, this effect has been "applied" to many fields like marketing, sales, negotiation and also in legislative world where a legislator will present a stupid bill that he knows will fail because of the backlash but will make his next bill more reasonable (as we see too often).

Re:Whatever...

[blair1q]

>Apparently when people see that there is something more expensive and more "over the top" they are much more compelled to buy the next lower version than if that same version was the high end.

don't confuse compelled for enabled

people don't want to feel like pigs

they feel like pigs when they get the biggest item

if they take the next-biggest item, they both satisfy their need to serve themselves, and their need not to be gluttonous

also, it's very common that the best value is to be had by taking the second-tier item; the reason is that on a learning-curve pricing scheme, the slope is steepest between items near the premium end of the curve; why a learning-curve pricing scheme applies is beyond the scope of this article, many reasons can be found, and exceptions as well

Re:Whatever...

[AnyoneEB]

Nah, they were just going by 3rd edition rules. ;-)

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

people don't want to feel like pigs

they feel like pigs when they get the biggest item

if they take the next-biggest item, they both satisfy their need to serve themselves, and their need not to be gluttonous

Remember, this is the US of A we're talking about.

Re:Whatever...

[313373_bot]

Hey, this is not +5 Funny, it's +5 Insightful.

Re:Whatever...

[Surt]

Yep, be sure not to spend $300 on any other components such as:
A pentium-d 840 ($350): http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/395410-1.htm
An athlon x2 4400 ($450): http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/318273-1.htm
A 500gb hard drive ($275): http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives/284422-1.htm

Re:Whatever...

[Firehed]

Does that logic not apply to cars, or is there something out there *bigger* than a Hummer?

Anyways, I don't really care what the reasoning is, but it works out favorably for me to spend $200 less to have second-best when it's very close to the best out there. It worked when 6800GTs were the great new thing, and it should hold true now.

Re:Whatever...

[hazah]

As a former Wendy's employee, you have my sentiments.

Re:Whatever...

[Surt]

I love the triple cheeseburger. Yum!

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way it works in D&D.

Re:Whatever...

[nacturation]

And this presents the perfect segue for Lunch, the HP Way -- for those old-school enough to relate to it.

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to stay off-topic.

Having worked at HP, I must say that the food is wonderful, except
for the day they fed us glass.

The sneeze guard broke somehow, someone was leaning on it or something
and glass was sprayed all over the food. Like any HP employee instead of scrapping everything, they brushed off most of the food and continued to
serve it!!

Needless to say, there were bleeding gums and angry employees everywhere....
just like most of HP's client base.

Re:Whatever...

[jacksonj04]

But all that graphics needs to come from somewhere. Yes, the GPU may be able to render the assets on-screen damn fast but without a fast enough processor, hard disk etc. the GPU will be held up waiting for things like textures to be decompressed and shoved into memory.

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

"As a former Wendy's employee, you have my sentiments."
All of them?

Not very bright, are you?

Hint: Look of the word "sentiments" before your try to use it in a sentence again.

Re:Whatever...

[Belial6]

Honestly, this pissed me off. I don't think for a second that Wendy's owe us a "double the meat" deal offer, but once they made the offer, they damn well should have to live up to it. This is definitly not a printing error. They know that they are falsely advertising their offer. (And by pissed, I mean annoyed jsut enought to go to a different restaurant.)

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hint: Look of the word "sentiments" before your try to use it in a sentence again.

Fucking retard.

Re:Whatever...

[Jeremi]

Does that logic not apply to cars, or is there something out there *bigger* than a Hummer?

Tragically, there is.

Re:Whatever...

[timeOday]

On the other hand, Wendy's cheating you out of a 6 patty burger probably saved you an enema.

Re:Whatever...

[Durf]

Well, yeah, but it's safer that way. Or do you want to be the guy who offers to increment some teenager's meat, and then have to wear one of those ankle bracelets that beeps when you try to leave home for the next five years?

Re:Whatever...

[tedgyz]

Did you actually intend to eat a 6-pattie burger? Just the thought makes my arties clog up.

Re:Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry to hear your disappointing story... you fat fuck.

well,

[joe 155]

obviously just sticking in a crazily expensive video card won't make a system radically better, computers are a bit bound to go at the speed of the slowest part (I know that doesn't always hold true) but if you computer costs $1000 then spending $500 on a card wouldn't be sensible

Re:well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. I'd say the motherboard is one of the most important pieces since every other piece of hardware connects to it.

This is one of the reasons I decided to buy a whole new computer instead of trying to upgrade my 3 year old Dell Dimension 8300 (p4 2.66ghz, 1gig generic ram, ati radeon 9600xt). Buying an extra gig of ram and a faster AGP card just didn't seem like it would be worth it since my motherboard was old and outdated and I wouldn't have been able to improve my computer much further (AGP is dying, etc.). So I decided I'd build a new AMD based system on a $1000 (canadian) budget. I've owned 5 intel's over my lifetime: a pentium 75mhz, pII 233mhz, p3 450mhz, p4 1.4ghz, and a p4 2.66ghz so this is a big change.

Here is the specs of my new system (all prices in Canadian dollars)

Antec Sonata II case (built in 450watt Antec SmartPower PSU) ($119)
MSI K8N Neo4-F (Nvidia Nforce4 motherboard) ($95)
AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ (dual core 2.0ghz) ($330)
2gig Kingston Dual-Channel DDR400 (two 1gig chips) ($194)
Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 Limited Edition ($199)
Western Digital 250gig 7200rpm SATA-II ($110)
SoundBlaster Audigy SE 7.1 card ($33)

I already own a 19" Viewsonic, logitech elite keyboard, razor diamondback mouse and altec lansing speakers so I didn't need to purchase those.

Total price of the system was around $1200 after tax (15% gst+pst)

This box is a beast, I get a constant 85-95fps in UT2004 at 1280x1024 all settings maxed.

Dual core is nice though you don't notice a big improvement in games, I do alot of multitasking and programming when I'm not gaming so I can put those 2 cores to good use. Hopefully more and more games will start to take advantage of dual core/cpu systems in the future though.

The Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 is an amazing card for the price ($199 canadian) but there are a couple of downsides to this card, it doesn't support Shader Model 3.0 or HDR (high dynamic range lighting). Oblivion still runs pretty well and looks awesome (playing it with HDR enabled would have been so much nicer though).

Overall, I think a $200-300 card is better then a $500 card in the long run (those $500 cards will be $200-300 in a few months anyway right?). You will want to research your purchase first and find out if it supports Shader Model 3.0 or HDR if you need the latest greatest tech in your card, for me, I'm happy with the performance of my X800 GTO2.

Re:well,

[Anonymous Coward]

And if your computer cost $500 in the first place (like mine did), then there's little reason to buy a video card at all!

Re:well,

[rapidweather]

The graphics card is powered via the slot on the motherboard.
I have had burn-outs of the motherboard power connector(s) due to too many cards. Takes hours to fix, one solution I have in place is dual power supplies, takes the load off the motherboard power connectors. Extra hard drives, cdrom drive can be powered by the extra power supply. I just turn on the main power supply first, then the second one, which is fixed with it's own toggle switch and power-on light. That way, the bios knows what to do. Next mod is a big externally powered fan, aimed at the memory bank, keeps it cooler. Comes on with the power strip(s), of which I use two, Monitor on one, PC on another.
I hesitate to use a big graphics card for fear that the power draw would do this setup in. Using a 32 MB card now, the monitor, a Gateway 2000 EV900 wouldn't look any better with a 64 or 128 MB card, or so I am telling myself.

Re:well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, sticking a radical new video card into my system is useless. I use a nice stable and secure, upgradable, open source OS and wish to keep it that way. Until ATI and nVideo release documentation for their hardware, they can keep it. What I think is really sad is that we can't even keep a united front on this issue in the Linux/BSD realm to pressure them.

Re:well,

[Anonymous Coward]

High-end graphics cards get most of their power directly from the power supply as well as drawing some power from the motherboard. Some of them use a standard 12V molex connector.

Re:well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you are like the Tim Allen of PC building.

Hint... buy a real case with a quality power-supply instead of the cheapest unit you can scrounge up. A good quality case and PSU will last you through 2-3 motherboard swaps before it's time to upgrade.

Shock! Horror!

[tomstdenis]

You mean you don't need the most expensive hardware possible to enjoy life?

No way!!! BUY BUY BUY!!! /me happy with my 6600 :-) [it's the cheapest non-crippled PCIe card I could find at the time]

Tom

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but try to play Fear or Oblivion at 1600X1200 resolution with all features on and AF at 16X on your 6600 and then tell me a 500.00 card isn't better

Re:Shock! Horror!

[tomstdenis]

I'd need to buy a 1600x1200 monitor first...

Besides I don't view "game not working on setup" as a feature. If the game was well put together it would have reduced texture/polycount modes so it could work on a more appropriate range of hardware.

There use to be a day where programmers were judged by how well they could make software fit the hardware. Not the other way around.

Tom

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear Hear! Well spoken, Bruce!

I still find no reason to upgrade my 6600 I got for $130.

Though I guess if I felt the need to run something at a resolution that did nothing but make the close textures blurry and polygon angles more noticable I'd sing another story.

1024x768 2xAA 4xAF is more than adiquate for me, holmes!

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Professor_UNIX]

Yeah but try to play Fear or Oblivion at 1600X1200 resolution with all features on and AF at 16X on your 6600 and then tell me a 500.00 card isn't better

I rarely play games at more than 800x600 anyway so no loss for me. My $150 GeForce 6600 card came with a $50 instant rebate for a video game at Best Buy so I picked up a copy of Battlefield 2 with the card. It plays absolutely fine on my AMD Athlon XP 2400+ system with the 6600 card at 800x600. It's AGP to boot! I imagine I'll need a better motherboard and processor if I really wanted to take advantage of some higher performance graphics cards, but I have other priorities at this time in my life. Maximizing my 401(k), building a house, putting away money for my child's college education, etc.

Have you sat back and thought about how far that $500 would go if you didn't just throw it away on a piece of computer equipment that will be obsolete in 3 months? For example, find some financial calculators and do some calculations of putting $500 every 3 months into a high growth rate mutual fund or stocks for example. I bet you'd be pleasantly suprised by the kind of growth your investment would return. Who am I kidding eh? This is Slashdot. Spend spend spend fools! Spend so my stocks will increase in value! Woohoo.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Nazo-San]

"No way!!! BUY BUY BUY!!! /me happy with my 6600 :-) [it's the cheapest non-crippled PCIe card I could find at the time]"

I'm sorry, but, I have to inform you that your 6600 is VERY crippled. Especially if you mean the non-GT version. The 6600 series started its life as a crippled card. The GPU, the NV43, is a weaker crippled version of the NV40, and, probably more importantly, while it boasts really fast sounding gDDR3 memory, its 128-bit memory bus actually makes it unable to compete even with the slower gDDR memory of the 256-bit 6800LE (that's right, even the elusive LE is a little better -- excluding the possibility that the LE can be unlocked and overclocked to become a lot better. The nu comes out even further ahead, again excluding unlocking and overclocking on the AGP models.) Mind you, if it had gDDR it would hurt even more since with such a low bus it needs all the speed it can get to compensate.

Actually, I have a point beyond just pointing out that little mistake. When the 6600GT was first released, it was called the Doom 3 card, and rightly so because it could get some very nice quality settings out of a game with such high requirements. Comparable probably to a Radeon 9800 even, but, at a lower price. And that price was no $500. Only today is the 6600 series finally beginning to truly show its weakness in games like Oblivion (which can bring even a X850 to its knees with the right settings.) The mid-range cards actually end up being the best investment for a person because by the time they loose their competitive advantage (cost vs performance) even the high end video cards are starting to struggle. In other words, by the time a mid-range card is no longer able to get you acceptable quality settings out of a game, chances are a high-end card is no longer going to be good enough either. In either case you must upgrade within the same sort of time range. If you spend $500 every time, it hurts a lot worse than if you just keep upgrading to the mid-range cards. Even if the $500 will buy you a little more time, it's not enough extra time to be worth that extra $200 or so.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[tomstdenis]

techno mumbo jumbo aside.

The card can play doom, farcry, halflife and ut2k4.

By crippled I meant the 6200 series "TurboCache" bullshit.

At the time I bought it I could get the 6600 for 175$, the 6200 for 60$ or the 6800 for 225$ [or the 7xxxx series for more than 250$].

But all the mindless comparisons aside it works just fine and doesn't cost 300$ now or when I bought it.

tom

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Chandon Seldon]

TurboCache is actually a great idea. They're currently only using it for trash low-end cards, but that doesn't mean that abusing the underused PCI Express bus to get a couple more megs of "fake" video RAM isn't the plan.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[tomstdenis]

TurboCache makes sense if all you need is a 2D VGA device. It's a cheap design.

If you plan on running even the most mild GL program on it though ... might as well go with the 6600. Or given the price the 7600 is a good idea too.

Tom

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still cheerful with my Nvidia Ti4200/128. It's getting to be 4 year old now (wow!) but it still spits 200 frames per second onto the screen. Its GPU and memory are both highly overclockable (and I occasionally do). I've also updated the video card firmware/rom with a newer version (which gave a minor performance boost regardless of whether you overclock it or not). This coupled with the bios upgrade I did a few years ago (which gave the whole system a 5% performance increase) makes the box snappier than when I bought it. I bought the '4200 because it was much cheaper than the 4600 or the 4400, but used the same engine, just slightly slower memory, and a slightly slower clock speed. My biggest bang for the bucks.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Chandon Seldon]

TurboCache is a technology that's not nessarily limited to the GeForce 6200 line of cards. It's true that those particular cards give comparitively low performance, but there's no reason why the TurboCache technology couldn't be in some future GeForce 7700 card that provides solid game performance.

In the general case, TurboCache is much more flexible for providing 3D texture memory than either 100% dedicated video RAM or 100% shared system RAM.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[tomstdenis]

No. Wrong. Using shared memory bad.

Tom

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Chandon Seldon]

While using shared memory to entirely replace onboard memory on a graphics card for video games is probably not optimal, I'm going to have to disagree with you in the general case.

Using shared memory appropriately in a TurboCache archecture is no more "bad" than using system memory instead of having a gig of on-chip CPU cache is bad.

All these system archetecture choices are cost/benifit tradeoffs, and a hybrid Shared/Dedicated memory archetecture is just more flexible than the alternitives.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[default luser]

ATI already did this with the release of their Catalysts 5.7 driverset last year. Those drivers enabled HyperMemory for all ATI cards.

The benefits were fairly good on 128MB cards, especially those with slower 128-bit memory. There were few benefits on cards with 256MB ram and faster-clocked memory, and there was even a sloght performance loss on the high-end.

While it is not a bad idea, HyperMemory and Turbo Cache will eventually go the way of AGP texturing (DiME). Just like AGP texturing, fast, large, cheap memory will eventually make HM and TC obsolete, even with the huge bandwidth increase dual-channel main memory plus PCIe offers.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[Chandon Seldon]

The general idea of having different memory at different speeds and using your faster memory to "cache" information from the slower memory is one that will be around for a long, long time.

It's true that specifically for PCI Express using main memory to supplement on-board memory will get worse as the PCI Express bus is used more fully by future cards, I doubt that it will become completely useless before the successor to PCI express comes around with "excess" capacity that can be used in this way. It's not like main memory is getting faster any slower than graphics memory, nor are games getting less hungry for texture memory.

Try $200

[eln]

I find the cards that are at the price point of around $150 to $200 are usually good enough to play new games for about 2 years after they're purchased with all of the eye candy enabled. After that, you can either buy another $150 to $200 card (which obviously is far more advanced than the one you bought 2 years previously) or continue to play newer games without all of the eye candy enabled.

Re:Try $200

[Hnice]

This is about where I've always bought, too, and I'm very happy. I do find, though, that I can't usually run things all out (8xAA and the anisotropic all the way up). I mean, I really don't care, because it's an arms race I simply can't afford to get caught up in, but I do think that there's a difference.

Re:Try $200

[Doppler00]

I'll usually spend $200-$400 on a video card depending on what's available at the time. My theory is that if I'm going to spend $200 on a new card, I might as well get one for $300 and not worry about upgrading it sooner. Sure, I might only get another %20 performance boost for the cost, but another $100 isn't that big of a deal to me, so it's worth it.

Yeah, if you're not into gaming that much it's probably not worth it.

Re:Try $200

[wyldeone]

That's not true.

I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.

Re:Try $200

[WuphonsReach]

Eh, I bought a 6800 about 15-18 months ago (I forget when) and it still does fairly well. It probably helps that I have it hooked up to a 2Ghz Opteron with 2GB of RAM.

Still, most of the games I play are at least 6 months old (CoD:UO is my major passion this year). I rarely buy games when they first come out.

I prefer to buy whatever video card was top of the line 12-18 months ago whenever I upgrade. That's generally just enough behind the bleeding edge that price/performance is at the "sweet spot". For the most part, that means spending about $200 every few years. (My old video card was a Ti4600.)

My 2nd criteria is that the new card needs to at least double the graphical performance according to multiple benchmarks. Otherwise, it's not time yet to upgrade.

Re:Try $200

[Junks Jerzey]

I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.

And truthfully, there are hardly any games that fit that description. Very few high-end PC games sell 100K+ units any more (mostly the big hits everyone knows, like Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2), so they're barely worth the development cost as it is, let alone the additional cost of adding features only seen by a 0.05% of the market.

Not very surprising?

[raz0]

Not going for the top of the line graphics card, motherboard, CPU, RAM heck virtually every piece of hardware yields you the most bang for the buck. Is anyone really surprised by this? It's common knowledge that companies will use high prices for their top-of-the-line hardware to cover the price of R&D, while later supplying nerfed versions of the same hardware to cover the casual or mid-range consumers.

7900GTX = top of the line performance
7900GT = high-end though much better performance/dollar ratio.
7600GT = mid-range runs-all graphics card that great for the budget-aware gamer.
7300GS = low-range graphics card for the casual gamer that wants to play the odd game of Sims 2 or similar.

Re:Not very surprising?

[Kjella]

Not going for the top of the line graphics card, motherboard, CPU, RAM heck virtually every piece of hardware yields you the most bang for the buck.

Actually it's more generic than that. If you look at hard disks (because it has such a good metric, but the same applies to all hardware) you'll see $/GB is not lowest at the low end - there's the infamous "sweet spot" in the middle. Same with CPU, the lowest CPUs don't give the most bang for the buck. There's some inherent costs in just producing and shipping the product, which means the lowest are typically really very crippled but not that much cheaper. In terms of absolute performance, mainstream is the best. Of course, that does not mean your utility of the performance is maximized unless it's exactly 1:1 with the dollar value. My parents could get a 7900GTX SLI & 750GB Seagate disks and their utility would be 0 (over their current machine). There's no sense spending money on performance if you're not getting utility, and it makes good sense to spend money where you are getting utility, even if you're moving away from the sweet spot.

Re:Not very surprising?

[tomstdenis]

You need a 7xxx series to get "mid gaming"?

I can run most FPSes at 1024x768 with my GeForce 6600.

I only spent 175$ on my card not 300$.

Me thinks you're not really viewing things objectively.

Tom

Re:Not very surprising?

[raz0]

7xxx doesn't say *anything* about the performace. It's just the graphics card "generation". What is *does* mean, is that it will support the latest technologies like HDR and SM3.0, but again I stress - it doesn't say anything about the performace. In fact, your Geforce 6600 is most likely more powerful (I haven't seen seen benchmarks, but this is almost certainly true) than the 7300 chip. And yes, I deliberately excluded previous generation cards from my posts, since it wouldn't add to my point. Buying last generation graphics cards is almost never a good idea if you want the most bang for the buck, since Nvidia and Ati repeatably produce new generations which cover all the price points from top of the line to low-range with support for the latest technologies, which you'll miss out on with a previous generation graphics card. Yes, your 6600 (GT?) has now been replaced by the 7600GT.

Re:Not very surprising?

[tomstdenis]

7600-256MB cost 180$, 6600-256MB cost 120$ and the 128MB version is 20$ cheaper.

That's today. But 6 months ago the price disparity was much higher. My 6600 cost 180$ when I bought it and the 7600 was over 250$.

Some people wanna game but don't care if they have to do it at 1024 or 800. Admitedly today if I had to buy either I might just go for the 7600 since the price difference is so low. So I guess you have a point about just sticking to the 7xxx series.

My bad...

Tom

Not actually news to me...

[Inverted Intellect]

The price/performance graph for most every imaginable computer component can be represented by a bell curve. It just so happens that I'm in the market for a 300$ graphics card. I plan on buying the Nvidia 7800 GS, which is the most powerful AGP card available. While it sucks that those with AGP mobos have been left without an upgrade path, this particular price range works fine for me. I figure it'll be the last major upgrade to my close-to-obsolete AGP slotted computer.

Re:Not actually news to me...

[Vidiot3k]

Sure there's an upgrade path... time to build a new system!

Re:Not actually news to me...

[coopaq]

Just a tip... I bought a $350 7800 GS for my socket 754 A64 3700.

After playing a few games I knew this wasn't right and returned it for a full refund.

I immediately ordered a socket 754 MB with PCI-X ( $69 ) and a 7900 GT ( $299 ) from newegg .

The out of the box performance was awesome and overclocking headroom insane.

You may have to reinstall Windows, but you may be able to get away with a restore.

I you aren't too hung up on APG consider this.

I just think the A64 3700+ @ 2500mhz has a lot of life left in it for gaming. My choice was an between CPU upgrade ability vs GPU upgrade ability and I chose GPU. Oblivion is my current haunt. Playing with HDR at 1600x1200 now. Cheers.

Re:Not actually news to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called PCI-E(xpress)! Not PCI-X, which is totally different.

MDA

[tonigonenstein]

What's wrong with an MDA ?

$300 is not expensive?

[suv4x4]

Wait a second, since when $300 for a friggin' video card is not expensive? Because there's $500 cards?
If there were plenty of $2000 video cards, would $1000 be not expensive then?

Someone's being brainwashed here...

When a pretty good video card is in the range of $80-$160... now that's more reasonable.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[chrismcdirty]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16814150098. Try that. If you're willing to spend twice the price, (and have an SLI-capable system) I hear they perform very nicely in SLI, and still less than the price of a $300 card.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[jellomizer]

I wish I had mod points today for that. The Hard Core gammer is expecting so much out of their systems and the game companies are obliging thus making these cards ultra expensive. I say stick with seeing some polygons for a while and use the money on Fun Games, or Food, or for Dinner(s) on a Date. Back in the old days of the late 80s and early 90s computer games were designed to run on the average running spec computer. CGA graphics were still Available, EGA was widely used when VGA was new, and could run on 256k of ram. At the Time getting a VGA Display and Card was close to $500-$600 And for a couple of years after that I have only seen one game released for VGA. But computer game companies stuck with CGA and EGA for a long time because most people didn't have VGA displays. VGA finally came to become standard around 92/93 and then SVGA was out but no games used SVGA they were all EGA or VGA. Not until 94 was SVGA games were introduced running on Windows 3.1 right before 95 was released with win32 abilities. But the games were targeted and performed optimally on the standard computer at the time. Then when Quake came out with support for 3d Graphic Cards, and network it started the hard core gammers started spending all the money for these cards because now they can see the moving pixels of your opponent where he is stuck on a lower resolution and get some skips you have the advantage and able to kill him without him seeing you. So hard core gammers got spend more an more money. And game companies realize there is a market they made games that push the edge more and more. And leaving a class break between people who play computer games for fun and Hard Core Gammers who do it for more then fun.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[mbourgon]

I remember buying the original Geforce. $300. Amazing graphics, used it for a long while. But if I'd known that it would cause the "average" videocard's price to be $300, I would not have bought it.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[suv4x4]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16814150098. Try that. If you're willing to spend twice the price

Thanks for that, I'm looking to update my card but always the next big thing comes up (or how about HD support now.. the latest bullshit) and I gotta sell my grandma to afford it so I'm just stuck with my GeForce MX4 here.

I felt really cheated by the article title you know? It went like: Forget about expensive video cards! Ok did you forget? Now we'll remind you with this review of $300 video cards...

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[chrismcdirty]

I agree. When my Radeon 9700 died a few months back, I was pretty mad that I could no longer buy that in a store, but I could still buy a 9550. So my choice was either that or an X7/800 for the same price I paid for my 9700, neither of which I wanted.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[ZeroExistenZ]

I agree... i'm still using my Geforce TI4200; I bought it cheap cause the DirectX9.0 cards were coming out and I didn't feel like going for the premature bugs and such.

There hasn't really been a game I couldn't play; I've finshed Halflife 2, all Need For Speed titles, all GTA titles, and so many more...
So why would I need to fork out 300-600 for playing what I can play now, but "better"?

Nothing has felt as sluggish and jaggy as trying to play Blood II with a voodoo2 card. on a P200. Are kids these days spoiled rotten? I had to work to finance my PC-spending, and I still do.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[SeeMyNuts!]

How much money are people supposed to spend on passive entertainment? It'd be better to spend the money not spent on gaming on tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert. Pre-produced entertainment has become so common and without novelty that live entertainment is actually more worthwhile, now. Perhaps it'll help remind people they are actually alive and not stuck in a cube-shaped room with a glowing window to an imagined world.

It worries me when I talk to a teenager and the first thing they want to talk about is video games. Video games video games video games. The perfect thing to occupy a mind that doesn't want to engage real issues and real responsibility.

Games aren't all bad, but there is just way too much of them! Throw a game at a kid and he'll slink away to a room for the next two weeks. Do that 20 times a year, and it's as if there's no child at all! Do parents feel good about this?

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[ergo98]

How much money are people supposed to spend on passive entertainment? It'd be better to spend the money not spent on gaming on tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert. Pre-produced entertainment has become so common and without novelty that live entertainment is actually more worthwhile, now. Perhaps it'll help remind people they are actually alive and not stuck in a cube-shaped room with a glowing window to an imagined world.

Your comment is very confusing. Plays and concerts are passive entertainment, and video games are active entertainment. Not really sure what any of it has to do with pre-produced entertainment.

In any case, many video gamers are busy playing challenging games socially (online games are prevalent now, often with dozens of players), often communicating and having fun with people from around the globe. Pretty hard to villainize that.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Volante3192]

It'd be better to spend the money not spent on gaming on tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert.

There's a better ROI on a video card though. If you want to go to a play or concert, that's one time. Not to mention additional costs in getting there, parking, outfit (especially for the play. Not every nerd has a spare tuxedo floating around.) Plus, if you have to pee, you lose part of your ticket price and it's impossible to get that back.

Video cards are used daily. There's minimal extra cost. (You're already paying for the electricity, minimal travel involved, and who cares what you wear.) And if you have to pee, you can pause and not lose anything.

Do parents feel good about this?

You'd have to ask Congress. They're the ones parenting now.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Ohreally_factor]

Is your grandmother hot?

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Jugalator]

I agree, and it's interesting how I think mid-range cards have almost increased in price since earlier in the Geforce 2 days. At least it doesn't feel like I had to pay $300 before to get a mid-range "reasonably long lasting" card before, but maybe my memory fails me. It definitely doesn't seem like the price evolution for the computer system in general anyway, with even "old" 2 GHz CPU's doing well enough today for most, and same for 1 GB RAM which is cheap today. It's just like gfx card prices tend to stick or even get worse. Maybe simply because gamers don't mind paying.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[clacke]

They are.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert. Pre-produced entertainment..."

Since when did concerts and plays stop being pre-produced entertainment? A play by definition is prepackaged (it has a script) and concerts are laid out in rehersals.

"The perfect thing to occupy a mind that doesn't want to engage real issues and real responsibility."

What are these for the average teen? Sitting around after school? Kids have been avoiding homework since it was invented. It isn't like they have companies to manage or kids to raise (notice I said AVERAGE teen).

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Peter La Casse]

How much money are people supposed to spend on passive entertainment? It'd be better to spend the money not spent on gaming on tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert.

Comparing video card prices to other hobbies or entertainment activities is an eye-opening experience. Tickets to the opera, plus tux rental, could easily total several hundred dollars. Learning to scuba dive, learning to fly a plane, skydiving, travel, and even a high-end bicycle can dwarf the cost of a decent gaming system.

I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I'd rather spend a couple hundred bucks on weeks or months worth of entertainment (Civ4 + the hardware upgrades to run it) than a couple hundred bucks on a single day's worth of entertainment.

I've often wondered why playing a video game with your buddies is considered passive entertainment. Maybe the people who think that have never tried it.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[SeeMyNuts!]

"Plays and concerts are passive entertainment, and video games are active entertainment." "In any case, many video gamers are busy playing challenging games socially"

I don't agree. People go to plays surrounded by other people, you get to see real people on stage exhibit the best people can muster without retakes, you often get to see a live orchestra, and you get to see how the story affects other people. People who go out also often end up at a restaurant and enjoy good food, as well. It can be a good family night out that the kids will remember a long time.

With on line games, you at best see someone else's avatar and not the real person. It's all abstractions of real people, based upon a different and imagined set of standards.

Multi-player video games, where a number of people participate together in the same room aren't so bad. But that is primarily sports games and a few others...it'd probably be better to go to a field and play the real thing, unless it's storming.

By saying "passive", I'm primarily concerned about people with their butts glued to a chair or couch, not really acknowledging the people around them. It's too easy to zone out and ignore all the other things that are going on. It can create a warped sense of social interaction and an inaccurate perception of work and reward. By "active", I mean engaged with the real world, and participating with other people--for better and worse.

All this can be argued both ways, but it mainly boils down to: is interacting in an imagined world better than the real one. In my opinion, the imagined world is driven by escapism, which isn't bad in reasonable quantities--it's just that people often over-do it to an extreme.

I would argue that one weekend out as a family or with friends could be worth much more than 12 months of an on-line game subscription. Its a matter of choosing what to spend that money on, and most people don't have the cash flow to support every option.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a TI4600, and you are right, there really isn't a game that this video card won't play that has decent quality. One game I found will not is Battlefield 2, which really pissed me off. I read something along the lines that the TI4200/4600 cards don't have a newer version of the pixel shader or something like that. I was looking forward to playing that game, but I guess I would need to get a new video card just to do so. When I factored in the price of a decent card ($150-200 I guess?) that would play the game, and the wasted time I would put into playing the game, I decided to pass.. atleast for now :-)

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Khaed]

or for Dinner(s) on a Date

Perhaps you're lost. This is slashdot.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Charcharodon]

When you move out of your mom's house and have a real job then no $200-300 is not expensive for a video card.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

$60-$180? Someone's being brainwashed here!

$7-$8, that's more reasonable.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ISA-Trident-8900-Video-Card-51 2K-Memory_W0QQitemZ8711480113QQcategoryZ3762QQcmdZ ViewItem

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[just_forget_it]

FYI, there are PLENTY of video cards in the $1500-$2000 range. They're for CAD workstations.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Bota]

are you sniffing warm gpus again charc? it would make MUCH more sense that 300$ on a video card is more of a financial hit when you are living on your own and paying bills/possibly supporting a family. I moved out of my parents house ten years ago,have two kids and a decent job. 300 dollars on a gfx card is well beyond anything I would consider reasonable. In the future maybe you should take into account that not everyone here at /. is an IT professional or making similar salary to yourself.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[suv4x4]

When you move out of your mom's house and have a real job then no $200-300 is not expensive for a video card.

Shit you're right! When you move out, they give you a free house and car and clothes, and utilities and all! Now you can use your ''real job'' income to finance your gaming machine, wiiiiiii!

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[ConceptJunkie]

Now you can use your ''real job'' income to finance your gaming machine, wiiiiiii!

So you want a Nintendo?

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Arramol]

So true. Even considering the cheapest form of theatrical drama, the movie, it's nowhere near as good of an investment as a video game. I typically pay $20-$30 for a video game, compared to $15-$20 for a DVD. Granted the games come with an added hardware cost, but a PC is fairly essential in today's society anyway, so the only additional cost is that of getting it up to gaming speed, which cost me all of $150 (GF 6600GT FTW). Now, with that DVD, I can watch a story for two and a half hours before I run out of content. With a good RPG, I can actively partcipate in the story for at least 50 hours. Even if I pay the full $50 for a new game, as I did with Oblivion, it's a much better investment. Some games also have much better storylines than the trash Hollywood's putting out these days. Hmm, Deuce Bigalow, or the latest Final Fantasy game? Not a hard call here.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Charcharodon]

Who is an IT proffession? And I make crap compared to most people in the really real world. Unless of course you believe that guy over on www.forsakeourtroops.com

Common this is /. mom's basement comments are the bread and butter around here. So I hope you take it as a jest, not as a personal attack..

Actually I agree $300 is too much to spend on a video card. I did pay $280 for my last one, but I was looking for a particular capability, namely the ability to accelerate graphics/video on both outputs (dual games/movies on dual monitors)at the same time, that and that they had slapped a $40 heat sink on it that I needed to buy anyway for my 9800pro whose fan had died, along with a $35 rebate that believe it or not actually made it too me.

Getting back on subject. Other than those few bleeding edge games that come out every year, much gaming goodness can be had from cards in the $100-150 price range, normally this where I buy. You just upgrade a little more often say once every year. While it ends up being similar in price to the $300 every two years, you end up with spares to build up a second and third machine within a couple of years that are still quite useable so that everyone in the family can have one.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Bota]

Sorry if my tone seemed a little peevish. I am the definitive example when explaining the old addage.
"Don't assume it makes an ASS out of U and ME"

    I also find myself in the group of upgrading a couple of times a year with the 100-150 dollar price range. I think a lot of people have underlying issues within their Operating system and/or game game configurations that provoke them to believe their 150 dollar AGP card can't be used for anything.
I personally run outdated hardware at all times and can play most games that were released in the last year. Mind you, I play at lower settings than some. usually 1024x768 as max resolution, and many water/bloom effects turned off. (who needs to the natural light of the sun reflected in realtime to get a headshot/kill the hydra)

games that run 'fine' to me
bf2, q4, CSS, city of villains, guildwars, WoW, eq2...

*my two cents: and the hardware worth negligably more than that
amd sempron @ 1.335 ghz
767 megs pc2100 ddr memory
radeon 9250se 256 meg (tweaked)
soundblaster audigy 5.1
Operating system FreeBSD6.0 as desktop/server
and windows XP sp1 for that hour a day I need to indulge in my MMO dreams.

***wonders why cedega is so shoddy on MMOs but kicks ass on all my FPSs***

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[timeOday]

$120 isn't too bad, but on the other hand that's about what I just paid for a Playstation 2. There's a huge catalog of great used games for about $10 each. And they actually work.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just dumped my Ti4200 for a 6800 for about $120. There are indeed games coming out that won't run acceptably on anything less than a 6200, for example Oblivion. There's going to be more and more games coming out that won't play on older cards.

Now if you're fine re-playing games you already own -- which works well for multiplayer mods and such -- then good for you. If you wait a few years, both the games and a card to play it with will be cheap. But if you're "spoiled" enough to want to play newer games, an older card is becoming less and less practical.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can get a hooker for that. And that's less than 1 hour of entertainment. If you see it from my point of view 300 for a descent gfx card is not bad.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[rho]

Is that a good card? Will that play my games? How about the games I play tomorrow? Will it play those well?

I ask those questions a lot, which I why I understand the people who buy an XBox, or Playstation. You may have to buy a new one in 2-3 years, but you're guaranteed to not have to worry whether KungFuTheftAutoEvilDiscoTron II will play at an acceptable frame rate or not.

Then I ask myself the question, "Is this going to be as much fun as playing Neverwinter Nights with a bunch of old D&D buddies once a week?", and then I don't even buy the XBox or Playstation.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[ben there...]

Pretty sure you can't replace your AGP MX4 with that PCI Express x16 card, in case you were actually considering buying it.

Re:$300 is not expensive?

[smbarbour]

I agree. Any video card above $100 is what I consider "more than I need". I have a $40 Radeon 9250 in my computer and have absolutely no issues with it. Okay, so maybe I don't play HL2 or any other high-end graphics games. They are all just the same old drivel anyway.

Me my Mum and I....

[MosesJones]

And then of course you have the home computer that I'm currently fixing for my mum (mom to USitiens) which has a very basic graphics card that powers the 17" TFT rather nicely, sitting next to that is the one my wife uses which has a Voodoo 3500 TV, running SUSE, and that works fine for her.

The ONLY people who need these graphics cards are people who place top end games. I find it stunning when I come across work desktops for people who do MS Office stuff that have only 512Mb RAM but a graphics card capable of doing Doom3 at decent framerates. 80%+ of people don't need even the 7900GT let alone the GTX and it would take a completely brain dead operating system to require people to have top line graphics cards just to run a word processor....

That of course is where my theory breaks down, Vista... you might not play games... but our developers do.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[ScrewMaster]

The ONLY people who need these graphics cards are people who place top end games.

That's not entirely true. For example, in the mechanical engineering department where I work there's one guy with a really fast PC and a high-end (I think nVidia but I'm not sure) graphics card that does 3-D design and rendering of parts for the automated machine tools on the plant floor. Not that many years ago, he would have had some kind of special "workstation video board" that would have cost a couple of grand. Those have all but died out as the likes of nVidia and ATI have pushed the performance envelope so far that engineering tasks pale in comparison to the requirements of a game. I guess my point is that there are many tasks that need high-performance 3D, they're just not as high-profile as gaming. And even that is a rather small subset of the total number of computer users out there.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[LiquidCoooled]

I recently "upgraded" from my nvidia 5900 AGP system to a pci express system, however was unwilling to spend lots on the graphics card.

I opted to get a nice motherboard with onboard nvidia 6100 on (only £40!).

I chose not to play half life 2 for a while because I didn't think it would play, but have been pleasantly surprised with the results since.
Sure, I can't run at super resolution (I think I use 800*600 now) but I have all the options turned up and it seems to handle HDR ok.
It barely slows down and I've held off buying a new card until something comes along that warrants it.

(I have a couple of hundred pounds put away until I need a new card)

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[Anonymous Coward]

fixing for my mum

huh? i'm totally confused!

(mom to USitiens)

oh, now i see! 'cause as a "USitien" i'm incredibly ignorant. thanks, UKitien.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[Ohreally_factor]

But you're basically saying that his high end PC is really a low cost workstation. For tasks like that, it makes total sense to use "cheap" (relatively) game hardware rather than expensive wildcat graphics boards (I'm not sure if they still even make them).

I think what the GP was scoffing at was the PHB that gets one of these $500 cards in his PC when he will never utilize the power.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[rreyelts]

In the past, I've worked on routing and logistics software. For one particular system, I developed a client-server mapping engine. The client basically sent a mapping projection to the server, which then ran a spatial index query against it, and returned the mapping data to the client in a compressed vector data format.

Where am I going with all this? The client machine was responsible for performing all of the rendering of the map. I was able to perform several important usability effects such as gaussian blurs (helps labels stand out against the map background) and transparency effects. Having a decent video card instead of an onboard intel extreme piece of crap, makes a very significant difference in rendering time.

People don't need great video cards for surfing the web and working with Word documents, but more and more enterprise software is taking advantage of hefty graphical effects as visualization aids.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[stunt_penguin]

"capable of doing Doom3 at decent framerates"

I'm afraid Doom 3, Farcry and even Half Life 2 are no longer reliable benchmarks for whether a card can play new games or not. My 256MB Geforce FX5700 allows me to play Half Life 2 and Doom 3 at pretty much full qual. settings (apart from FSAA) and a good res., but it fails miserably on Oblivion and isn't even supported by Ghost Recon:Advanced Warfighter.

There are no such things as the top end games and low end games- just the new and the old, and the new games will always push the bracket further out, for better or worse. If you want to play new games, you'll need to have bought a 300 card in the last 2 years, basically.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[just_forget_it]

If your 3D design department is running gaming cards instead of workstation boards than either you have an extremely stupid IT department, or what you're designing is extremely simple.

I hate to break it to you, but workstation cards are alive and kicking. The Quadro and FireGL are still available, and for $500 is it MUCH better to have a low-end workstation card than a high-end gaming card. Gaming cards do not have the full OpenGL functionality that 3D design applications need. In my experience, using the wrong type of 3D card can result in random program crashes and data corruption, since the gaming cards are designed to throw as many pixels and textures at the screen as possible, and not accurately render polygons.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[ScrewMaster]

Okay, I'll buy that ... but you don't seem to see them as often as you used to. Doesn't matter to me, I'm just a software guy, but in the places I've worked that's been the general attitude. I guess they're just being cheap.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[just_forget_it]

That seems to be a growing trend in the industry, too. At my company the Network Admin gave us new CAD workstations equipped with ATI Radeon x600's, a mid-range gaming card at best. When you have bean-counters in control, they tend to think that they're not going to reap $1000 in increased productivity by spending that much more on 3D cards.

Re:Me my Mum and I....

[hackstraw]

For example, in the mechanical engineering department where I work there's one guy with a really fast PC and a high-end (I think nVidia but I'm not sure) graphics card that does 3-D design and rendering of parts for the automated machine tools on the plant floor.

Which warrants a $500+ video card and a $2-5k computer because these things used to cost $10k+ 10 years ago.

Again, Word and Office don't need even a $200 video card.

Solitaire and Freecell maybe, but not Office apps.

Erm

[Luthair]

If this story was meant to be about how one can build using budget hardware, why are they using a top of the line CPU? Would it not have been better to pair the GPUs with a cost appropriate one?

Re:Erm

[Proud like a god]

To take CPU bottlenecking out of the equation. Comparisons of CPUs with the best graphics card likewise attempt to take GPU bottlenecking out of the equation.

Re:Erm

[Trejkaz]

Problem is the person buying the graphics card isn't going to be able to take the CPU bottleneck out of the equation, so for everyone who would actually want to buy the cheaper graphics cards, the review is almost useless.

Well...

[Aphrika]

I have a PC with a ATi 9800 Pro in it which I use for gaming. I've had this since 2003 and it still plays a mean game of Battlefield 2 when I feel like it. If it runs a bit slow then I plonk the resolution down. This is by far the best way to get your game to run faster. Anyway, bottom line is - it runs whatever current game I'd care to buy for it.

Now I've thought about upgrading, but two things have hampered me. The first is strictly technical - I have an AGP machine, so there's not a huge amount of difference over a 9800 Pro whatever I plug in there because it'll always be limited by the bus speed.

The second is probably more of a personal thing - I've got mates who have the latest and greatest GFX cards in their machines, but I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between their games and mine. Sure, it's a slightly higher res, but are there any bonus features like fog or smoke? No. Better anti-aliasing? No. I spent my hard-earned cash on a Dell 20" widescreen monitor and I can assure you that as far as gaming experiences go, this added to mine much more than a new GFX card would.

Maybe it's me getting old, but hardware upgrades now tend come when I buy a new PC, and be a notch under the top o' the range. Although having said all this, I just picked up a Inspiron 9400 for work which did come with a GeForce 7800 in it, which I guess'll be useful for um.... spreadsheets *cough*

Re:Well...

[ScrewMaster]

Just make sure that you configure your "boss button" properly.

Re:Well...

[AaronLawrence]

t'll always be limited by the bus speed.
I doubt it. Like AGP before it, the PCIExpress bus is still far slower than onboard video ram, therefore it isn't especially important in terms of framerate.

Re:Well...

[soupforare]

The X800Pro (and up) beats the 9800Pro. Get something like the X850XT/PE and you're good for another long while.
Remember, PCI-E was introduced for the future, we haven't hit on games that saturate an AGP 8x bus.

Re:Well...

[jeffmeden]

While this may be true for you, it's a nice blanket statement that absolutely does not apply to everyone. I also have a 2005FPW and I find it to be the best thing since sliced bread. But, once i realized how much better games looked at the native 1650x1080, I didnt see a problem with dropping the cash for a better video card. It makes a world of difference to me to be able to run native res, while still using high res textures and all of the effects. And to answer your seemingly rhetorical questions, there is a HUGE difference in effects generated by the current generation cards and the ones from even a few months ago. Shaders, fog effects, water effects, HDR, etc. have become much easier for the GPU to do as time marches on and hence make the visual experience much better. Yes, I may sound elitist with this statement, but in my opinion modern gaming isn't worth doing if you dont have at least a near modern graphics card.

Re:Well...

[Charcharodon]

My big upgrade this year was the Dell 24" widescreen. I was looking at the 20", but then they went and put it on sale. The 9800pro I had tried to keep up but choaked a bit under the 1900x1200 load. So I pickup up a 7800GS. I have a dual slot motherboard by Asrock, it has both APG and PCI-ex 16x on it so I could delay my purchase and wait for the post Christmas prices for a new video card.

The extra push in the eye candy department was nice. BF2 does look much better, but the thing that I'm getting the most mileage out of is the fact that the latest cards have the ability to excellerate graphics/video on both outputs not just one like with my 9800pro. I have my old 17" set up next to the 24". What am I talking about? Essentially what it lets you do is run a game/video on either monitor or drag it in a window from one monitor to the other without it stopping and locking up the computer. Add in a dual core processor and now I can run a game and a video at the same time.

Playing MMO's and watching TV goes together like peanut butter and jelly, and yes I did find it possible to run two game accounts one on each monitor at the same time possible with some games, but only if I turned things down quite a bit.

Re:Well...

[ocbwilg]

I have a PC with a ATi 9800 Pro in it which I use for gaming. I've had this since 2003 and it still plays a mean game of Battlefield 2 when I feel like it. If it runs a bit slow then I plonk the resolution down. This is by far the best way to get your game to run faster. Anyway, bottom line is - it runs whatever current game I'd care to buy for it.

I once paid $300 for a video card. It was a 9700 Pro, right after they first came out, and it last me about 4 years. I eventually upgraded my system from a 1600+ to a 3000+, but kept the video card. It had no problems keeping up, even through the release of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. I got a lot of life out of that card.

Now I've thought about upgrading, but two things have hampered me. The first is strictly technical - I have an AGP machine, so there's not a huge amount of difference over a 9800 Pro whatever I plug in there because it'll always be limited by the bus speed.

It's not really a factor of bus speeds, as most PCI-e cards don't come anywhere close to saturating the PCI-e x16 bus. That's why when SLI on PCI-e first came out (not to be confused with the original SLI back in the 3Dfx days) your pair of x16 cards in x16 slots reverted to x8 rates. I can't speak for what's on the ATI side of the fence, but there was a very noticeable improvement going from a 9700 Pro AGP to a 6800GS AGP (almost double the frame rates in some games).

The second is probably more of a personal thing - I've got mates who have the latest and greatest GFX cards in their machines, but I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between their games and mine. Sure, it's a slightly higher res, but are there any bonus features like fog or smoke? No. Better anti-aliasing? No. I spent my hard-earned cash on a Dell 20" widescreen monitor and I can assure you that as far as gaming experiences go, this added to mine much more than a new GFX card would.

Yes, actually there are newer features. SM 3.0 mainly (and along with it HDR), but a lot of those effects make a very noticeable "eye candy" difference to the games. And of course you can always crank up the resolution, turn on higher detail levels, or start using AA and AF features for an even better picure. Granted, the 20" widescreen probably isn't a bad investment either.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

...we haven't hit on games that saturate an AGP 8x bus.

I dont think it is GAMES that haven't consumed then entire availble bandwith that AGP 8x can provide, as it is HARDWARE, as you should know that GAME developers will use what is available, as that is what the little table on the back of a PC Game package ie, the minimum & required specs :)

digram

Re:Well...

[damiam]

The second is probably more of a personal thing - I've got mates who have the latest and greatest GFX cards in their machines, but I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between their games and mine.

I have a 9700 Pro (also from 2003) and I thought the same for a long time. But there are games out now which will make it choke, Oblivion being my best example. It's mostly playable when set to lowest quality settings, but the framerate drops to almost nothing whenever someone casts a chameleon spell or when I'm fighting multiple enemies. It's still a great game, but it doesn't look nearly as gorgeous and it's not as playable as it would be on a higher-end card.

Re:Well...

[AaronLawrence]

No, I'm not dense. When AGP originally came out there was a lot of hyperbole about how it was going to make everything so much better.
But actual analysis showed that the AGP bus is still an order of magnitude slower than onboard video RAM, so if your game has to load any significant amount of data across the AGP bus, it will immediately drop to low frame rates.

The same is still true of PCI express: onboard RAM is much faster than the bus, so you can't afford to send much data across the bus. YOu need to pre-load most of the textures to video ram.

Obviously, PCI express is faster and better, and will have some impact, but I suspect not as much as marketing would suggest.

What am I missing out on ?

[aspeer]

I have an Nvidia 5200fx card that drives a Dell LCD panel at 1600x1280 via a DVI connector. I use KDE as my desktop manager.

I am genuinely curious what (if any) performance gains I would see by upgrading the video card to one of those mentioned in the article ?

Are these mid/high end card only beneficial when running 3D games or OpenGL apps, or do "Joe Sixpack" users such as myself gain something as well ?

Re:What am I missing out on ?

[raz0]

The short answer: Yes. The long answer: Unless you play any new games on a regular basis and find them to be rather slugish, then no, you won't benifit anything from upgrading. The only reason to upgrade your graphics card today is the get better performance in games and other 3D applications. Nothing will be gained 2D-wise. Perhaps with aiglx and the like you will be able to use the true power of your graphics card, but that's not now. Also, these new effects would have to be damn shiny for them to put pressure on even a low-end card like the 5200FX.

Re:What am I missing out on ?

[arkhan_jg]

The 2D performance of graphics cards has barely moved for years, all the work (and extra transistors) go to much beefier 3D capability. Unless you're thinking of moving to a shiny new 3D desktop - of which there are several in development for linux - you'll see next to no advantage on your existing X11/KDE desktop. About the only advantage of upgrading for 2D desktops is higher resolutions, but the limit is generally the monitor now, not the graphics card. If you're going to dual-boot vista of course, a good 3D card will be an advantage, but a 5200fx should actually do reasonably well, it's not that old a card - I used to use that card for a 2nd gaming rig a couple of years ago!

As you surmise, the current gen high/mid-end cards are basically for games and openGL apps. About the only other advantage is improved MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding, which lowers the CPU load when playing videos - useful if you're building a PVR. The nvidia 6 series and upwards do have the purevideo software for windows as well, which does improve video quality somewhat.

To be honest, I now prefer a slower passively cooled graphic card (currently got an nvidia 4200) in my workstation/servers, and I've gone for the hot and noisy SLI 7800GTs in my games rig, which is only on while I play games.

Re:What am I missing out on ?

[TheRaven64]

I read a paper from Microsoft Research[1] about rendering text using the GPU. The idea was that the raw bezier paths of each character in a font would be loaded onto the GPU and then each character would be created on the fly by a shader. This gave a huge performance benefit; it reduced the GPU-RAM bandwidth requirement hugely and allowed the CPU to offload pretty much all text rendering to the GPU.

For comparison, take a look at Apple's Quartz 2D Extreme. This uses the CPU to render each character to a texture and stores them in the graphics RAM. These are then composited by the GPU. The downside of this, of course, is that the CPU needs to render the text for every size at which it is used. Even so, this gives about an order of magnitude better performance than the traditional way (and, of course, lower CPU usage).

If this becomes mainstream then a GPU with fast shader support will give:

• Faster text-rendering performance.
• Lower CPU usage when rendering large amounts of text.
• The ability to have effects like Apple's Exposé, but with sharp, fully anti-aliased text at all stages in the zoom effect (the performance on current generation GPUs was fast enough to render entire screens full of small text every frame).

[1] See? They do actually do interesting things. It's a real shame nothing from MS Research ever seems to make it into shipping products though.

Re:What am I missing out on ?

[SeeMyNuts!]

Nothing will be gained 2D-wise.

This is why a brand new Opteron server motherboard with PCI-Express and other big-time features still ships with ATI Rage XL graphics and 8MB video RAM on-board. It is good enough for practially everything except CAD and gaming or super-big displays, and it consumes very little power.

2D cards need only enough RAM to store the framebuffer and some other goodies. With double buffering that's only 2*X*Y*RGB (e.g., 2*1280*1024*3 = 8MB!).

7800GTX and lack of power

[cbelle13013]

I recently purchased a 7800GTX for work and was surprised about the additional power consumption needed. A regular Joe Blow probably doesn't have the resources needed to even use one of these $500 cards.

I've got a Dell Precision 370 and after plugging in my new card, I don't have power cables left to go anywhere else. It would be nice if they could just draw off the motherbboard power. Now my home PC is a different beast, but there's something about taking home expensive work resources that my employer frowns upon.

The emperor has no clothes?

[Evro]

I'm so glad they've found that you don't need to buy an "expensive" video card, just a $300 one. Personally I can't see spending over $150, and even that seems extreme to me now that my days of trying to eke out every frame in Q3 to hit the magic number have passed.

Re:The emperor has no clothes?

[Emetophobe]

$300 is the most I would ever pay for a graphics card.

I got a Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 LE (Limited Edition) for $199 Canadian.

For some reason ATI Tool says it's an R430 core (x800) with 16 pipelines already unlocked. I thought I read in a few places that it was a R480 core (x850) with only 12 of the 16 pipelines enabled. Is mine a later model or is ATITool just reporting it incorrectly? Anyone know about this?

Common sense!

[Parallax Blue]

This sort of thing is just common sense... doing a bit of research on video cards and their performance instead of going with the most expensive one out there is being a smart consumer and really isn't too hard what with all the reviews available on the 'net. Unfortunately, many people just don't do this for various reasons.

Summary does not match article

[GauteL]

In fact the $500 cards perform noticably better than the $300 cards. You may not think it matters much, but new games, such as Oblivion, are incredibly graphics intensive. Only the top-end cards from ATI are able to play Oblivion completely smoothly in 1600x1200 with all the buzzwords activated.

If you play highly intensive games at insane resolutions, then the high-end cards may be for you.

On the other hand, if you ever think about buying a $500 card because it will "last you longer", then you are kidding yourself. You are almost always better off buying $250 cards and replacing them twice as often.

Re:Summary does not match article

[TomHandy]

Only the top-of-the-line ATI cards can do this, but not the NVidia cards? You're saying that an Nvidia 7900GT or 7900GTX can't play it completely smoothly with 1600x1200 with everything activated? I have to say, I'd be pretty ticked off if I spent $600 on a 7900GTX and I noticed even some slight amount of jerkiness in Oblivion.

Re:Summary does not match article

[Chandon Seldon]

Oblivion is the "current" video card abusing game. Historically, there has usually been a game that supports higher quality graphics than the top of the line cards can produce - because new cards will come out that support those graphics modes later.

I don't know about 1600x1200, but at 2500x1600 Oblivion does manage to crush any card on the market at full quality.

Re:Summary does not match article

[GauteL]

The Nvidia cards can't handle both HDR and AA at the same time. At least not in the way it is solved in Oblivion.

Re:Summary does not match article

[Anonymous Coward]

THERE IS NO VIDEO CARD THAT DOES PLAY OBLIVION AT DECENT FRAMERATE
WITH ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES ON.
Take an 1900XTX, turn on HDR and AA on 1600 resolution with all the eye candy on. 30 FPS ISN'T SMOOTH. Smoothness comes with 50/60 FPS minimum. Bigger than 60 fps is a little bonus.

You NEED crossfire or SLI, and a fucking big processor, 2gb of ram to run decently this game with all the eye candy on.

Re:Summary does not match article

[NeMon'ess]

Doom 3 has an Ultra Quality setting that requires a 512MB card. When the game was released there were no 512MB cards for it. The actual difference between High and Ultra was negligible, but my point is that Oblivion could have shipped with enough eye-candy extras that when turned on, would limit a 7800 to 40fps at 1600x1200. As I remember F.E.A.R. was also pretty debilitating even to the high-end cards when it came out. I wouldn't get ticked off, just keep in mind that when you eventually upgrade the games will look even better.

A 'Wow!' moment.

[eddy]

It's not often that I go "wow" after a hardware upgrade. 486-&gtpentium class. First Athlon. Virge3D ->3Dfx Voodoo 1 (glquake for teh win)... and just a week ago I went from a nVidia PCX5900 (and ATI 9600XT/256) to a 7900GT. Everything on High in BF2 (and 2x FSAA); smooth as butter. Going from 800x600 low textures, everything down in oblivion to 1280x960 HDR: Wow

Re:A 'Wow!' moment.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that your post is buzz word and hip-speak compliant. The bad news is that I have no idea what you are saying.

Who let this get through?

[ecuador_gr]

I really don't get it.

Exactly the same (and obvious) conclusion as any review I've seen on sites like HardOCP, Anandtech, Tomshardware. Is it news that this article is one of the most amateurish attempts at reviewing cards we've seen in recent history? 4 benchmark runs (at least they use games) put together in little fps graphs along with a 2-page grade school level analysis and of course no details about more important stuff like image quality etc.

Maybe it's just me, since I have never paid over $200 for any kind card, and I would probably object seing such an article on [H], Anand, Tom etc being made "news". However, this particular article is not even close to that level. It really seems like it does not offer anything noteworthy.

Skewed results?

[travail_jgd]

All of the benchmarks in TFA are run at 1600x1200.

I understand that maximum resolution is the best way to highlight the limitations of the cards. But how many "budget" gamers are going to have monitors capable of running at those resolutions?

All of these cards produce "acceptable" results at 1600x1200. I read the article as "the cards are identical at lower resolutions, but reporting you need to spend more money makes our advertisers happy." Or maybe I'm just cynical.

Re:Skewed results?

[CodeMonkey42]

Most real gamers (budget or otherwise) still use inexpensive CRT's which produce the best image quality, have zero ghosting, zero dead pixels, etc. and easily do 1600x1200 for the latest games or 800x600 for "classic" games. My $200 NEC AS900 easily outshines the majority of LCD monitors in image quality, and the majority of games I play on my NVIDIA 6800 GT are indeed at 1600x1200.

Re:Skewed results?

[heinousjay]

I object to your use of the word 'real.' Anyone that plays games is a real gamer. You refer specifically to the subset who somehow ties their penis size to the 1% increase in performance they get from putting their system at risk of meltdown by massively overclocking everything.

Re:Skewed results?

[vondo]

Soon I will be one of these "budget gamers." By that I mean that I don't spend a lot of $$$ on game related hardware and software, not that I have no money. I'm buying a 1600x1200 LCD to increase my productivity at home. I also like to play the odd game (generally a year or two old) and want a video card that is able to play my games at the highest resolution my monitor will support. My next game purchase may be Neverwinter Nights 2 in early 2007, so at the point I will probably looking at a 7600-level card. By that time, those cards should be in my sweet spot, about $100-150. At the moment I am using the 6150 graphics built into my motherboard and for the things I play, that's fine.

Re:Skewed results?

[Tyrant Chang]

Well, I'm planning on buying a new monitor soon and I'm probably going to get the new widescreen 20" monitors from Dell. I think it has a pretty reasonable and affordable price @ ~530 (older models were like 460). I think 400~500 dollar range is in the budget gamer range.

Anyway, the resolution on that monitor is 1680x1050 and I think most people will start buying these large wide-screen monitors for most new computers (or at least people who are buying computers for games). So while high resolution maybe not relevant for people who already has computers but I think it will probably relevant for future consumers...

Actually, I rarely look at fps for lower resolutions now since I am in the market for widescreen 20" lcd monitors.

Re:Skewed results?

[Anonymous Coward]

we'd like a vial of sperm and an applicator that looks like jodie foster's knuckles.

could you explain your sig?

Re:Skewed results?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a line from Family Guy

Re:Skewed results?

[Surt]

A $350 monitor will display 1600x1200. So if you can afford a $300 video card, I don't see why your monitor won't give you 1600x1200 resolution.
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/mas terid=677664

Re:Skewed results?

[MikeBabcock]

I run dual screens at 1152x864 each and I'm hoping to be able to afford the video card to run NWN2 and Oblivion each at good speeds.

Probably a post-Christmas bonus purchase.

My PC as it is now.

Re:Skewed results?

[Babbster]

A $350 monitor will display 1600x1200. So if you can afford a $300 video card, I don't see why your monitor won't give you 1600x1200 resolution.

I'm just guessing here, but maybe it's because someone who already has a monitor would be willing to spend $300 for a video card and not $650 for a video card and a monitor?

Re:Skewed results?

[Saeger]

Watch out with the newer 20" widescreen model (2007), VS the older one (2005). Reports indicate that the newer model fixes some of the light bleeding from the corners that plagued the older model (is barely noticable on mine), but that the colors are more washed out. So, you'd be paying more $ for not much besides a better contrast ratio, and blacker blacks, and getting crappier color reproduction. I went for the cheaper 2005fpw.

I had also considered getting the 24"incher instead, but then I weighed in on power consumption: it ate as much power as my old 19" CRT (about 130Watts), but the 20" ate only 55W. So I figure I'll get 24" when they switch from always-on backlit LCD to OLED in the next couple years, for massive power savings and a big boost in natural color range. The other thing being that to drive 3D gaming @ native 1920x1200 vs 1680x1050 would require a beefier videocard than I was prepared to buy.

Re:Skewed results?

[olman]

Erh. CRT capable of displaying NICE 1600x1200 resolution is practically 21". Some 20" tubes can do that but that's pushing it.

They're not that "cheap" either. It's starting to be so that no tubes are made except for graphics professionals etc. You see big manufacturers stopping crt manufacturing..

I just checked big online component store and they have whopping 1 21" CRT on sale and 2 19" CRTs. Hundreds of LCDs, thought.

Ironic

[Life700MB]

I find it funny to read about paying 500 dollars for a GPU the day after John K. Galbraith died.


--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

My 64MB Nvidia card gives good performance

[ravee]

I have a 64 MB Nvidia card which gives decent performance while playing many openGL based games. I wonder what is the specification of a PC which get it classified as a gaming rig...

Umm $300 IS expensive

[nurb432]

When you can buy the rest of the box for about the same price, spending that much on just video is lunacy.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[Surt]

It's only lunacy if you do spend only $300 on the rest of the box. But you could also spend $300 on just the harddrive, or just the processor, or even the sound card. It all depends on what aspect of the system performance is most important to you. For anyone playing games, the video card is going to come in well ahead of any other component in terms of best bang for the buck.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[randyest]

Wait. Because one element of a computer system can cost as much as the rest, anyone whose priorities are such that they're willing to spend that much is a lunatic? And this pompous, unfounded, non-sequitir of a claim is insightful?

Huh, well. I guess I'm a lunatic then, since I've spent $300+ on video cards several times over the last decade. What's worse is I'm perfectly happy being a lunatic and somehow, despite my lunacy, I'm able to keep a good job that provides the means to repeatedly act on my insane hardware-buying impulses. I'm so fucking crazy that I can't even realize it; I actually think that I bought what I wanted so I can play the games I love at high resolutions with maximal detail and effect (BF2.) I truly have no remorse about my lunacy -- I am, in fact, so deluded as to think a $300, $500, or even $1000 GPU can be worth the cost, and that the relative costs of video cards and the rest of my system are totally irellevant! I'm completely incapable of seeing what must be to you a glaringly obvious correlation between video card expense and sanity. Oh man I'm truly too far gone; there's no help for me!

I mean, here I am with 175 hours logged in BF2 using my >$300 video card in the year or so since it came out, and that works out to almost $2/hour for me to play what I think is an incredibly fun game, whenever I like, with 63 of my closest friends. Surely my insanity knows no bounds, and this subjective choice of mine is completely unacceptable. If I were less crazy, I would have consulted with someone like you to ascertain the best way to spend my $300 in discretionary income that I wasted on a video card. I mean, it's clear from your incredible logical deduction that you are a wise sage with an objectively-flawless set of priorities that should be emulated by all others. My mind reels in wonder when I try to speculate on what item you'd have pointed me to instead of my frivolous (and batshit insane!) decision to buy a $300 video card! Would you have suggested 75 chai lattes? 600 newspapers? 10 detailed D&D figurines? 60 issues of Time magazine? 30 pairs of grey sweatpants? 20 anime T-shirts? 15 discounted DVDs? 6 fleshlights? My mind boggles, as I am utterly incapable of guessing the nature of the light you doubtlessly could have shown me, had I only bothered to ask!

Anyone less crazy than me would instantly recognize that a video card actually does very little for a computer system and that GPUs are simple, easily-designed and manufactured items with far less complexity and R&D expense required than, say, a case, power supply, motherboard, RAM, mouse, or keyboard. It's absolutely unthinkable that a sane person would place so much emphasis on the image-generation capabilities of a computer system when everyone knows computers are for email, word processing, spreadsheets, and the occasional game of solitaire or minesweeper! How can I be so feeble-minded as to believe that any computer should ever have more video-processing power than a Voodoo2?

I hope you're sitting down (on your no-frills, unpadded, folding computer chair) because this may terrify you: I'd still think it was a bargain at twice the price! And there are many others just like me -- Boo!

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[nurb432]

The world is full of lunatics, your point?

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[Surt]

Haven't you heard? Violent video games lead directly to real life violence. Your 175 hours of BF2 are like 8/10ths of a murder by now. You're probably at least 5% of the way to becoming a psycho mass killer.

Also, where can I buy some fleshlights? Those sound cool.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[randyest]

That, lacking an objective disinterested observer and/or a universal reference, it's impossible to be sure which of us is the lunatic. Frankly, I don't care; I'm having fun.

I'm kind of surprised I had to spell it out for someone like you who clearly thinks so highly of his own opinions. Hey, how about that -- it turns out you're boring and slow.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[nurb432]

Was just pushing your buttons. Seemed like i was effective.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[geofferensis]

Keep on living the dream man. Keep on living the dream.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, here I am with 175 hours logged in BF2 using my >$300 video card in the year or so since it came out, and that works out to almost $2/hour for me to play what I think is an incredibly fun game, whenever I like, with 63 of my closest friends.

In other words, you are a fucking loser who needs to get a life.

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[randyest]

You misspelled "troll."

Re:Umm $300 IS expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! That is exactly right! Now you may sleep peacefully in the warm safety of your newfound knowledge that those who are more sucessful and happier than you are "fucking losers" who need to "get a life," which presumably refers to one like yours that includes a neverending variety of Ramen and envy. If we're all miserable, you'll feel happier!

But...

[Yvanhoe]

... how a 300$ card can fit in a 100$ PC ?

Re:But...

[lastchance_000]

Easy, you just need a big enough hammer.

Haven't had a 'wow' moment since...

[Junta]

3dfx voodoo 1 also from a Virge that didn't really do much interesting at all). Before that it was 286 to Pentium (I could play ultima underworld so smoothly compared to my friend's low end 486).

Maybe I'm just not easily impressed anymore, but everything I can recognize as being better now, but it seems evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Going to Pentium is when I got the horsepower to play fundamentally 3D looking games (Doom, Ultima Underworld), whereas before the best I did was Wolf3D. And again, going to Voodoo 1 added a depth to the 3D games and that has evolved from there with higher polycounts. If I went to Voodoo 1 straight to a modern video card, I'd probably be more wowed, but from a 5900 to a 7900, I really just shrug that sort of difference off when I see it.

Re:Haven't had a 'wow' moment since...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Going from a 286 to a Pentium is about a decade's leap in technology. A 5900 to a 7900 is about a couple year's leap. I think that might be why you weren't "wowed".

Re:Haven't had a 'wow' moment since...

[Chandon Seldon]

The 5900 -> 7900 leap is pretty significant. I'm suprised you aren't impressed by it.

You're talking about the jump from "Runs HL2 decently at 800x600" to "Fully supports all the features needed to run HL2: Lost Coast beautifully at 1600x1200". If you really can just blow off four times as many pixels, higher resolution textures, TAA, and HDR lighting, then that's your loss.

Re:Haven't had a 'wow' moment since...

[NeMon'ess]

Check out Half Life: The Lost Coast demo with High Dynamic Range lighting. The demo includes a vertical split-screen that renders the left half without HDR and the right half with it. The difference is quite impressive and is making a huge impact. It's not so much about duplicating the look of movies or TV cameras, as making the lighting look real.

On bright days the sky turns white as you look towards the sun, shadows change in intensity with the lighting. HDR does this and it looks like we see the world.

Very happy with my 6800GS

[DrXym]

I built a computer recently. While I briefly considered buying a high performance card, at the end of the day I don't believe they are worth it. Cards and CPUs seem to be governed by a law of diminishing returns. What's cutting edge now won't even raise an eyebrow in a few years. So why fork out absurd amounts of currency for one? The same with the various "extreme" CPUs. Spending 2-3x the cash for something which delivers a 30% gain is just stupid.

In the end I picked up a pretty good NVidia 6800GS which is more than adequate for most games. It works well at full res and detail on most games. If for some reason I want to improve the performance even further, it also supports SLI (and my motherboard too), though I doubt I will bother with it.

Re:Very happy with my 6800GS

[Emetophobe]

I just bought a new computer a week and a half ago myself.
Got an Athlon64 X2 3800+, 2x1gig Kingston dual channel DDR400, 250gig Western Digital Caviar 7200rpm SATA-II, Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 256mb limited edition, etc. etc..
Total cost of the system was $1200 canadian after tax, the graphics card was only $199 but runs as fast as a $300 card or better.
My X800 GTO2 came with the 16 pipelines already unlocked so I didn't need to mod it =)
It's probably one of the coolest graphics cards I've ever had, it's so easy to overclock it aswell with the built in Sapphire Trixx software. I stopped buying nvidia a while ago as all my nvidia cards' fans would die after 1 or 2 months. So far Radeon has treated me very well and haven't had any fans seizing up and dying on me yet.

Re:Very happy with my 6800GS

[Chandon Seldon]

I would like to point out at this time that a decent $300 card has 24 pixel pipelines. Now, the X800 GT02 is decent, but you haven't managed to cheat your price point significantly.

Re:Very happy with my 6800GS

[DrXym]

Your system sounds pretty close to what I built. SATA II, 3800+ X2 & 2 Gig. My graphics cards works great with the system. It was an overclocked XFX version but it didn't cost too much. To be honest the main reason I bought it was because NVidia XP and Linux drivers are a known quantity for me and I trust them.

wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

who doesn't know that already??

Do you game in 1600x1200?

[BassKadet]

I know that 1600x1200 really stresses the GPUs in these cards but I often wonder how many people are actually gaming at that resolution. I have lots of hardcore gamer friends in the area and I've seen their rigs and I know that only 1 of them has a monitor bigger than 19" and runs 1600x1200. Sure, 1600x1200 looks great on a 19" monitor too, but with a monitor that small 1280x1024 still looks very nice and to push the res up to 1600 really isn't worth the FPS hit. Or at least, that is the concensus amongst my friends. I don't mind paying the $500 for something I want, I have camera lenses that cost twice that amount. But somehow it just seems excessive to spend an extra $200 over a $299 card to gain 5-15 FPS for a game in some high resolution I'll never use anyway.

Re:Do you game in 1600x1200?

[Chandon Seldon]

Sounds like the video card isn't the component that's holding you back any more.

Re:Do you game in 1600x1200?

[LordPixie]

I gleefully play games at 1600x1200. But this is obviously after a significant and expensive hardware upgrade. And it's going out to a 21" LCD with 1600x1200 as its native resolution.

    That being said, most people probably DON'T play like that. Cranking up resolution is extremely taxing on most of your resources. If you're working on a budget, dropping the resolution lets you keep all the other eyecandy effects, and save some cash in hardware. If you've got a decent stockpile of money to blow on gaming equipment, then you can hit those higher resolutions.

--LordPixie

Re:Do you game in 1600x1200?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 21" LCD so I don't have much choice. 1600x1200 is the native resolution and therefore every other resolution ends up looking like crap. I need $300 video card just to make games playable. Even with $300, Oblivion has it's moments where it chugs along at 11FPs. I'm guessing that most people with a 20" or 21" LCD games at 1600x1200.

Re:Do you game in 1600x1200?

[BassKadet]

"Sounds like the video card isn't the component that's holding you back any more."

Well, at what point does a computer monitor start to become a home entertainment monitor?

I already have a 42" Grand Wega HDTV for my xb360. I'd love to have the desktop real estate a 24" LCD affords, but I'd have to buy a bigger desk and frankly I don't want some behmoth desk taking up half my den.

Somewhere down the road home theater and the personal computer will converge but it's not 2006.

Re:Do you game in 1600x1200?

[Chandon Seldon]

Well, at what point does a computer monitor start to become a home entertainment monitor?

The minute you start playing video games on it.

More seriously, there's no reason that a higher resolution monitor implies a giant monitor.

• 19" CRTs commonly support 1920x1440.
• A 23" 1920x1200 really isn't that huge.
• 20" LCDs come in 1600x1200 and 1680x1050.

The point is better quality video, and resolution is an important component to that.

I already have a 42" Grand Wega HDTV

Have you considered hooking it up to your computer? I bet that would look awesome, expecially if it does 1080p (assuming you have a decent graphics card).

Cost/Performance Breakdown

[Starcub]

I remember when the V1 3d cards were first ccame into the market. They were easily top of the line and the best cards went for about $200. When the next generation V2's came out, I pre-purchased the very 1st V2 SLI card (actually 2 cards bridged together) at the incredibly expensive price of about $600. It was alot, but the card literally quadrupled the performance of the V1 I had and the price very quickly fell another $200 before the V3's were out. Today you pay $500 for a top of the line single GPU card that doesn't even double the previous generation's performance. It seems video cards are becoming a disproportionally expensive component of the PC and just aren't providing the same value.

Re:Cost/Performance Breakdown

[Surt]

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx =33&model1=282&model2=288&chart=97
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx =33&model1=282&model2=288&chart=102

The 7800 GT (~$350) yields roughly 50-100% more performance than a 6800 GS ($200).
So .. you get roughly 1.75 times the performance, for 1.75 times the price.

A shocking ripoff. Compare that to a similar investment in CPU. You could get an Athlon 64 3500+ for about $200, or an x2 4200+ for $350. Will you get 1.75 times the performance out of the x2? Not even close, even on multithreaded apps.

Re:Cost/Performance Breakdown

[DirePickle]

That's a silly analogy, though. You spent 3x as much money to quadruple your performance. Now, you spend the same amount of money 12 months later to increase performance by 25-50%.

More realistic would be replacing your $200 Voodoo 1 with a $200 Voodoo 2 (as opposed to the $300 12 megs). Would it have been faster? Sure thing. Even 2x as much, though? Well, probably not, really.

Re:Cost/Performance Breakdown

[thepotoo]

All you have to do is wait a couple years, and you can pick up that $500 card for $80. Depending on your last card, this should about double your performance. Besides, it's a seller's market in video cards today. It's changed a lot since gamers were a niche. Now EVERYONE plays games, and the video card companies know this, so of course they take advantage of it.

Re:Cost/Performance Breakdown

[Starcub]

The cost of computers today is roughly the same as it was 8 years ago when I upgraded my 1st 3d graphics card. However, the cost of a high end graphics card in particular has gone from about $200 to $500 over this same time period. What does that increase get you? The same thing, the ability to play the latest games at acceptable frame rates. That works out to an average 12 month generational cost increase of about 12.5% per generation. So yeah, I guess you can still say you're getting your money's worth today if you think the 35%ish performance gain does you any good. But the point is that that performance gain isn't nearly the same as the 100% performance gain that existed 8 years ago.

So while the computer industry as a whole has mangaged to offer vastly increased performance while keeping the price constant (or even decreasing), the video card industry has lapsed. Sure they provide the performance increases, but do you really need or want them? It's 3d game development really that is driving this industry. Compare your 3d gaming experience in the days of the V2 to what it is now. Was it worth the cost increase? I think the video card industry behaves according to the law of diminished returns, it just isn't providing the same value to it customers.

Whats the friggen point?

[a_greer2005]

A buddy of mine has a AMD 3800, ATI radion x1900xtx, and 2 gb ram, and maxing the graphics out in some of the latest games cause it to be noticably jittery, so why spend $2000 on a gaming PC when an xBox 360 does jitter free HD for $400?

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[TomHandy]

Because not every PC game someone might want to play comes out on the XBox 360? Because some people don't like playing FPS's on consoles when they can play them with a mouse and keyboard on their PC? Because some people find XBox live to be overpopulated with whiny 12-year olds, ruining the multiplayer experience? Because you miss out on some of the customizability and modding that you get with PC games (in Oblivion, for example)? Just a thought.....

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[MadBurner]

split screen multiplayer sucks donkey d**k!

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you if you set that "maxed out" PC game down to the 360's 1280x720, the 1900 would be a lot less jittery.

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Far Cry (original), FEAR (original), ....

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right that not every game comes out from PC to console, but the previous poster never mentioned FPS games specificly. I like FPS games as the next person, but when people make that argument it make it sound like the only games you can play on PCs are FPS which is not true. PC gaming is more than FPS games and that's what I love about them. Consoles have used KB/M for FPS games before. You can use a KB/M on certain PS2 games such as Half-Life and you can use a keyboard and/or DVD remote control to move around the XBOX 360's dashboard instead of a gamepad for example.
Come to think of it, the Dreamcast had KB/M support for years starting with its webbrowser GD-ROM and pushed during the release of Quake 3 and other FPS. Also, regarding the XBOX 360 and Live, no matter where you go, you will find immature people playing games on PC/XBOX Live/PS2 it doesn't matter. On XBOX Live on the 360, you can however look for certain classification of player such as family, casual, dedicated, and underground (where the 12 year old minded gamers most likely roam). Since I use casual, I've met nothing but great people who just play the game for the sake of playing and having fun. Live 360 do give the option of allowing a underground player to participate with casual players at their option (and the player can be booted by the user hosting the game on Live) if no underground games are in session for example.
As for the case with the PS2, KB/M usage is apparently dependant on the developer of said game. I can't speak regarding the 360 since most games can use the keyboard for input of text only and not direct control of the game (If I recall this is a policy with Microsoft and personally hope they reconsider allowing developers optional KB/M support in future games).
PC and console gamers are both one in the same. They're gamers. Something silly like control issues shouldn't have to divide the two. Both have games that work best depending on the player's personal preference of control style. Just because I don't want to play a fighting game on PC with a KB/M don't mean that I can't adapt by simply plugging in a gamepad. Likewise with consoles. Some even use the TV vs monitor argument as well. It was already solved, again with the Dreamcast with a offical VGA cable/breakout box and again with the XBOX 360 and its offical VGA cable. Yes, there will always be FPS on consoles, but it depends on the console platform if it wants to support optional KB/M control for its games like the Dreamcast did. Yes, it'll cost money, but I won't quibble over $15 at Wal-Mart for a cheap USB keyboard/mouse combo for my XBOX 360 when I spend more than that on renting movies.
As for modding, there isn't really a limitation of consoles anymore with the advent of harddrives. There is some small progress with console games like Far Cry Instincts/Predator with its included map editor. Yes, it's a slow start, but a start just the same.

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Xugumad]

Excluding the points other people have made; that's great for this generation. However, if I want my graphics to improve over the next 5 years, I'm going to be getting PCs...

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! And why should I bother with a video card at all when I can software-render everything in 64x48!

You get the apples to hobnails comparison award for the day.

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[GauteL]

1. The games differ greatly from the XBox games. You may not like console games.
2. The machine is upgradable
3. The games cost almost twice as much for the Xbox 360 (at least here in the UK).
4. You can use the computer for other things than gaming and watching DVDs.
5. You may already have a PC that can be upgraded decently cheaply.

I still think the latest graphics card are unjustifiably expensive, but the older ones aren't so bad, and it was easier for me to justify spending £70 on a graphics card (GeForce 6600gt) than £300 on an Xbox 360.

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[FelipeAlmeida]

In Brazil a 21" HDTV costs about 6,000 Reais. Which is about 2,800 dollars.
A 17" CRT monitor costs about 400 Reais.
Seems to me like having better definition in computers is a lot cheaper than with consoles.
At least here.

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[rho]

FPSes like GoldenEye for the Nintendo64?

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Surt]

6. It's nigh unto impossible for someone who grew up with the right handed 2600 controller to adapt to the left handed controllers used by the 360 and all the other consoles these days, which leaves us playing games on PC with nice right handed mice.

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Russellkhan]

I present myself as evidence against your theory.

I grew up playing on my Atari Video Computer System (It wasn't until years later when it was released with new packaging that I heard it called 2600 - maybe around the time of the 5200 introduction) and kick much butt on my PS2 at my favored console games (usually polygon fighters when it's time for head to head competition).

Re:Whats the friggen point?

[Surt]

Hence only nigh unto impossible, and not impossible.

I know many people have actually adapted, but I know many others who don't play consoles for this reason.

Practically irrelevant - unfortunately....

[King_TJ]

This whole discussion centers around the best 3D gaming cards for the money. This is only *barely* a concern for the Mac using audience, much less Linux users. Just because you can play a few games like Quake or Doom in a native Linux version doesn't mean it's a primary concern of many Linux users to have optimal 3D gaming performance.

The OS just doesn't really have gaming as a primary focus. So ATI's lack of focus on Linux compatibility isn't all that surprising on their $300-500 cards made for gamers, is it?

Re:Practically irrelevant - unfortunately....

[Yetihehe]

So ATI's lack of focus on Linux compatibility
For me its lack of focus on overall compatibility. I saw many computers with nvidia and not so many with ati, but with ati almost everytime there were problems. I speak only about original ati/nvidia drivers. With custom drivers like NGO this could change. For my GF6800 NGO drivers added muuuch stability.

Re:Practically irrelevant - unfortunately....

[Anonymous Coward]

You are FULL of shit.
We badly need 3d cards for Maya and other highend 3d programs. And ATi are the worst for this. ATi has a long history of bad OpenGL support and unfortunately, there is no directx on highend 3d apps and no directx on linux or OSX.

To see the bad history of ATi just see the gamers using radeon crying like little babies when doom 3 came out. Doom 3 is one of the last OpenGL game and it pushed the limits of the cards opengl drivers, for the gamers.

Nvidia's OpenGL is excellent. Quadro are one of the best and even the Geforce can sometimes do the job. The firegl are barely acceptable and the Radeon are just stupid.

right, so the budget video card is $300

[nazsco]

earth is calling. moron.

the lowest reviwed board had doom3 runing at 1600x1200 with all the eye candy maxed out at some 99FPS! anything beyond 25 is a damn waste! WASTE!

the budget card should be one that runs doom3 at 1200x1024 at 25fps.

$300 is the price for the crippled over the top video card the extravaganza you will never need. $500 is for dumb snobs that wana pay double for a dick increase in Ghz.

Re:right, so the budget video card is $300

[yfkar]

And what makes you think 25 is a magical limit?

Re:right, so the budget video card is $300

[Treskin]

The old "30fps is all the human eye can periceve in games" myth was busted back in the Voodoo 2 days - please don't attempt to resurrect it, gentle sir!

Re:right, so the budget video card is $300

[VanessaE]

Allright....It's been said before in other similar stories, but since you either didn't see it the last few times or you chose not to care, I'll repeat it for you one last time:

If the video source you're watching (that includes the rendered output from your game) does not show full motion blur between frames, 25 fps will sure as hell not be enough. Depending on how good your visual system is, it can take 85+ fps with no motion blur to fully saturate the available bandwidth of your visual system.

The reason is that without the blur, your mind perceives an image that, when moving, suddenly jumps from one position to the next. Your mind normally reads the blurring effect found in film recordings and interprets it as a smooth motion, probably because there is a certain amount of image overlap from one frame to another. Without that blur, there is no overlap, and your mind balks at the idea.

And then there's the issue of when a game drops below some magic number (which varies from one person to another) even for a short time. It's not so much that you're seeing it rendering at 30 fps - it's that your eyes and your mind see a massive loss of framerate when you're used to seeing the game rendering at 60+ fps.

And if you want to go on about price, consider this: A month or so ago, I spent some $590 to have a new box built (Gigabyte mainboard with an Athlon64 x2 3800+ and 1GB DDR2, 450W power supply which was probably not quite enough, decent case with two extra fans, etc), and I stuck an nv 6800 in it that I paid $134 for from another vendor. I used this nVidia comparison chart to make my selection based on raw performance numbers. I don't trust reviewers not to spin their stats in some certain way, beyond getting an initial idea of the performance of whatever it is I'm leaning toward buying.

To the two people I saw earlier mentioning "WOW!" reactions...this system elicited that same reaction from me, given that it replaced a very old 800 MHz P3 :-)

Re:right, so the budget video card is $300

[nazsco]

I don't think that i got your last paragraphs... anyway.
You three people are just saying that HDTV/dvd using 30fps is just an inadequate technology already?

Re:right, so the budget video card is $300

[nazsco]

> And what makes you think 25 is a magical limit?

It's what the eye/mind can perceive. Actualy, 24fps. Search for persistence of vision

Re:right, so the budget video card is $300

[yfkar]

That's not how it works. You can clearly see the difference between 24 and 60 fps.

'Expensive' video cards?

[Bing Tsher E]

When I started reading the summary, I latched on the '$200' as an expensive video card. Which it is. Then to discover the article is talking about $300, rather than $500 video cards.

Uh....

It's similar to when you see a 'Save $17,000 on your next car purchase" advertisement, but you've never spent even $15,000 on a car.

Okay, I confess that I've spent more than $150 on a video card, once. It was an STB PCI card that had a daughterboard on it that gave it the extra 4 megs of RAM.

The idea that my 'gaming experience' would increase to the point where it would justify spending $500 on a video card is just bewildering. And I played through ALL the levels of Wolfenstein 3D back in it's time.

I guess gameplay is more important to me than gee-whiz graphics. I still buy games, but usually check to make sure my hardware meets the minimum requirement.

This whole 'subculture' reminds me of the culture of riced out cars, to be honest.

$100 is my upper limit

[macemoneta]

When I buy a replacement card (which I haven't had to do since I bought my GeForce FX 5600XT a couple of years ago), I buy whatever is currently at the $100 price point. That lets me play better than 95% of games well. If I were buying today, I'd get a GeForce 6600. It's more than good enough.

No matter what card you buy, in a short period of time there will be a small number of games that need better. Chasing that carrot with no self control is an exercise in futility.

Re:$100 is my upper limit

[Anonymous Coward]

Fool, a 7600GS costs $104 shipped from newegg and will blow away a 6600. I think you should be willing to spend $125, since anything below $100, performance drops very quickly.

Re:$100 is my upper limit

[NeMon'ess]

If paying $150 gave you twice the performance of the $100 dollar card, it is you who is losing out.

To give you a real example. $100 will buy a Geforce 6600GT 128MB. $135 will buy a Geforce 7600GS 256MB. The extra 35% in price buys more like a 50% increase in performance.

Re:$100 is my upper limit

[macemoneta]

To give you a real example. $100 will buy a Geforce 6600GT 128MB. $135 will buy a Geforce 7600GS 256MB. The extra 35% in price buys more like a 50% increase in performance.

And how many more games can I play for that 35% increase in price? 1%, maybe? A 35% increase in price, for a 1% increase in use doesn't sound like a good price performance compromise. Save that $200 on each upgrade, and guess what? Through the magic of good investing and compound interest you and your spouse can retire at 45, and you can play games all day long. Now that's a real value.

Re:$100 is my upper limit

[NeMon'ess]

Good thing your bank does the compound interest for you. I'll do the big example first. If paying $150 got you a card twice as powerful as the $100 card, you wouldn't have to upgrade to a new card for twice as long. That saves you money because you got more bang, and more use out of the card, for your buck.

And where the heck did the $200 come from? I'm talking about a $135 card. Pay the extra $35, and the card will play your games for 50% longer than the $100 card.

Not to mention that with the extra 50% performance, you'll be able to play Civ4 and other games at a higher resolution, letting you take in more information, and making the experience more enjoyable.

Not a huge amount of difference over a 9800 Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

I replaced my trusty 9700 Pro with a saphire x800 gto. I patched the bios to unlock an extra quad of pipes and my 3d mark score doubled (before overclocking). I was able to run bf2 at 2 higher resolutions, up the AA from 2x to 4x, and importantly enable vsync. Very different bf2 experience. Considering I spent only $170( more than twice the what I paid to get my 9700 pro), I am very happy. PCI express does have better bi-directional support, but I think agp 8x support was dropped too soon.

What about games?

[Junta]

I realize there is more to 3D than games, but generally speaking only games provide reason for new video card purchases, since moderate graphics cards can handle XGL and such sufficiently.

I know UT2k4, Quake3 (and below), Doom3, and Neverwinter Nights all run native linux, but why not call for linux compatibility from game publishers? I know at least I'm disappointed in things like Oblivion and NWN2 not being on linux (and by extension not on my list of stuff to buy). NWN1 sucked a fair amount of licenses out of my household, but without Windows licenses and not wanting to use something as much of a kludge as wine to play a game, no more licenses for us...

A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[abigor]

I'm off on a 4 month holiday, and I'm taking a 3 year old laptop with me to play a few games on during downtime (I travel a lot, and I know from experience how many boring moments there can be). I've never played any games on it, and I need advice as to what games I should buy, since obviously it won't support anything close to the latest and greatest. What older games are there that I should seek out?

2.4 GHz P4, 512M, ATI Mobility Radeon 9000

My ideal game is Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Of course, I can't play it on this laptop, but that should indicate the sort of gameplay I enjoy. Doesn't have to be strictly fantasy, though.

Any suggestions are much appreciated, thanks.

Re:A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[ajpr]

FPS:
Deus Ex (original, not the sequel called invisible war)
Alien Vs Predator

God Games:
Sim City 4
Black & White

RTS:
C&C Generals/Zero hour expansion
Rome: Total War

RPG:
Neverwinter Nights
Baldur's Gate II (bit dated but probably best RPG made)
Dungeon Seige (this is RPG/RTS)

Re:A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[Mafiew]

My favorite RPGs were fallout and fallout 2, very cool retro cold war/post apocalyptic sort of feel. Kind of old now but still incredible. Another game I like is an indie game called Bridge Construction Set. You're given the challenge of designing bridges to meet constraints like load, materials, and cost. Very addictive, though some of the harder ones will probably make you want to smash your laptop.

Re:A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Dungeon Keeper 2. 'Cos it's great.

Re:A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[Anonymous Coward]

elder scrolls 3: morrowind plays just fine on that

Re:A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[Nim82]

Morrowind (if you havent played it already). Prequel to Oblivion, but superior in many ways. Has a wide range of modifications already available to enhance it visually, and add to the gameplay. Ive had easily 300 hours + gameplay out of it since I got it :).

Re:A bit offtopic - need gamer advice

[abigor]

Excellent suggestion, thanks very much.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Expensive Video Cards make sex better.

[LibertineR]

Performance anxiety? Not here!

I run two 7800GTX cards to run 3 Viewsonic VP201b 20" displays and one 30" HDTV.

"Stop complaining, Bitch! If you had an HDMI port, I'd be done by now."

Modern babysiting

[nurb432]

"Do parents feel good about this?"

Sadly for many these days, its by design.

True, plus the need for more power is diminishing.

[fak3r]

I had a 6600 GT nVidia card in my Dell/Linux box, and it was overkill for all I wanted to do. Look at the kewl new effects with xgl and 'stretchy' windows -- really cool effects that don't need the kind of graphic horsepower I had. Now I'm looking at a Mac Mini -- years ago I would have never considered on board graphics, but the fact is, it's now more than I need. I love games, but I don't have the time to play the latest ones, so I end up playing the ones that are most fun. Quake II and III don't need allot of graphic power, and I've seen CS:Source running on XP on a Mini and it played great! Those are the only things I need now, so the market for 500$ video cards will diminish over time, as it has. Sure, the tweakers that need the most will get them, but joe and jane user aren't going to need a 512Meg RAM video card to check their email.

Radeon X800 GTO2

[Emetophobe]

I just got a new computer with a Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 (already unlocked to 16 pipelines).

I paid $199 canadian for it. The card is absolutely amazing, I get 90fps in UT2004 with max settings at 1280x1024 and around 60fps in Call of Duty 2 and Doom 3 at 1024x768 and high quality settings.

the Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 (limited edition) is definitely a special card for the price! Paying a huge chunk of money for 1 graphic card or even more for a SLI setup is just crazy, these mid-range graphics cards perform well enough as it is IMO.

Re:Radeon X800 GTO2

[Dster76]

where did you find it in Canada for $199? NCIX seems to be charging more.

Re:Radeon X800 GTO2

[Emetophobe]

where did you find it in Canada for $199? NCIX seems to be charging more.

At a local chinese computer store about 15min from my house. http://www.cty.ca/

They have great prices, got a 250gig western digital harddrive for $100 even ($115 after 15% tax)
Plus I just built a pretty killer dual core Athlon64 gaming rig for $1200 canadian after tax all parts bought through them.

I live around Markham-Richmond Hill, pretty much all the computer shops around here are asian run, but this area is highly asian so that makes sense I guess =)

Wapperjawed

[jrmiller84]

Also on the flip side, if you're going to spend the 200$-300$ as I did, do your research first. I made the stuipd mistake of buying a 200$ Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB before realizing that it was actually a Sapphire made card that runs on a 128 bit bus instead of a 256 bit bus. So while I have a "Radeon 9800 Pro with 256 MB of video memory" (booming voice!), it's actually a piece. Of course it plays all of the newest games but there is much room for improvement. Moral of the story... do your homework before buying ANY video card (high, mid, or low end), don't listen to the name.

Or Try $50

[drooling-dog]

If you're not into gaming...

Re:Or Try $50

[Khaed]

Agreed.

You can get a very decent card for $50 now that will play a lot of games... just not the games where the whole focus is how graphical they can be. I wonder sometimes how big the cutting-edge market really is. I can't see myself upgrading my current setup ($50 nVidia, 256MB card, 1GB of RAM, Sempron 64) any time soon, just because there are faster processors and better video cards.

I guess I'd just be annoyed if I tried to have a cutting edge system, and every three months something better came out.

Re:Or Try $50

[NutscrapeSucks]

If you're not into gaming, $50 is way too much. Just buy a system with integrated video and it usually works about to about $15.

Re:Or Try $50

[Jesus_666]

Even if you're into gaming a $50 NVidia will usually do the job unless you're one of those persons who think that anti-aliasing will miraculously turn a mediocre game into a good one. I bought my card at last year's Cebit for forty Euros (it's a noname Geforce FX5200) and I can still play most new games with most eye-candy active. Could, if my Cedega was working properly.

Everything above ~75 bucks is only for those people who actually believe that the more effects a game has the better it is. And, quite frankly, they deserve getting ripped off like that.

Re:Or Try $50

[stalky14]

Word on the FX5200. I picked up one with a TV out so I could play the odd game on my HTPC system. I never run it higher than 800x600 anyway, and what's the point in having refresh rates faster than the monitor can actually draw? I do most of my gaming on consoles, so 60fps is perfectly adequate for me.

As I read the submission here ...

[timothy]

It seems the submitter considers $300 *not* to be expensive. for a video card. Reminds me of the saying "Good work, if you can get it." Right now I'm typing on the fastest computer I've ever owned,* which was a low-end box-store model about a year and a half ago. It cost $350, including a pretty nice CRT monitor. (Half gig memory, Sempron something-something processor, 60gig hard drive, lousy integrated graphics which are perfectly fine for anything not involving 3D graphics, and basically worthless for anything that is*, DVD/CD-R, big ugly case.)

A $500 video card sounds to me like the "ludicrous speed" setting in Spaceballs. Not that there's anything *wrong* with that! It's neat to see what people do, including concentrating large chunks of money on short-lived computer components, because companies chase those people, and in doing so may end up greatly improving products for cheapskates ;)

But $500! For a video card! Still makes my head spin a bit.

What's the best one can do in a 3D video card supported out of the box by Debian or Red Hat that costs something like, oh, I dunno, ONE hundred dollars? I might be tempted at that, especially if there's a card that will let me actually use 2nd life's client, which my built-in card will not.

timothy

*Actually, my Thinkpad (far more expensive) might technically be faster, but it's hard to compare for someone as lazy as me.

** OK, so I gave myself away as not being generally in the $500-video card market ;)

Re:As I read the submission here ...

[ben there...]

You can get an nVidia 6200 for ~$40 or a 6600 for ~$100 on newegg.

Re:As I read the submission here ...

[timothy]

Thanks for the information. Do you have any idea how well either one of those works straight-out-of-the-box on a typical Linux system? (That is, something like Debian or Red Hat, with no proprietary drivers or modules.) I don't need GREAT performance, but even OK 3D performance would be nice ;) The integrated graphics chip on my eMachines sempron machine doesn't even want to play TuxRacer, which is pretty silly considering that my old Matrox card (several years ago) did that fine.

Yes, I can google -- but I should be studying, and so won't google today ;)

Cheers,

timothy

Re:As I read the submission here ...

[ben there...]

Yeah I should be working too, yet I find myself slacking on Slashdot. ;-) I just happened to be looking at both of those cards online to put in my old beast. Someone, somewhere, mentioned that the 6200 was recognized right away by SuSE, for what its worth. Should work right out of the box on most distros. You'll need the nVidia binary module for fast 3D acceleration though. I'm mostly considering the 6200. It's so cheap. AGP is dying anyway, so I don't want to put a lot into it. I just need a card for Oblivion. Besides newegg, check out ebay. I think I might be outbid to higher than newegg's prices, but it's worth giving it a shot. Good luck finding a cheap card. If you get one too good, you'll never study, lol.

Old news.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying this for years. It's one of ATI's biggest faults that they have a bad tendency to focus almost purely on the high end and let their mid-range and low-end products fall behind (there are exceptions, but, this has generally held true.) Nvidia has earned a lot of profits selling products such as the 6600GT for lower prices than comparable ATI cards could meet while ATI concentrates on having the most powerful cards and getting those high profits from a much smaller number of people. Don't get me wrong, I'm no nVidia fanboy -- in fact, my current video card is (well, was) one of those overly expensive high-end cards from ATI.

What really bugs me though is watching both of them try to fool people with even more expensive things that offer practically nothing. For example, those 512MiB VRAM video cards. The more ignorant consumers fall for it and believe the video card is twice as good just because it has twice as much memory, so spend an insane premium when, in fact, by the time more than one or two games can truly utilize the higher amounts of ram on cards pulling this trick, the GPU is old technology and not really able to very well keep up with the other demands of the games. Each generation of cards pulls this trick and in each generation it gets them more money for a video card that only performs very slightly better.

Here's an article for you: "Consumers don't research their video cards well enough and spend money on what sounds good rather than what is good. Videocard manufacturers capitalize on this." There, I just summed up the whole industry in two sentences for you.

Re:Old news.

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. I also love how they futz with the graphs to make them look like they're worth it:

fps (more is better; we recommend spending at least $300 for the best overall experience)
$500: *************** 100 fps
$400: ************ 99 fps
$300: ********* 98 fps
$200: ****** 97 fps
$100: *** 96 fps

1%?

[LibertineR]

Uh, that would be 3% for the latest ATI card, and a whopping 5% for NVidia.

Poser!

Minimum for XGL

[radarsat1]

All I want to know is, what's the minimum amount of $$ I can spend to be able to run XGL?
I don't play games, I just want my accelerated desktop...

Re:Minimum for XGL

[t35t0r]

$24 AGP8x nvidia cards http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Orde r=PRICE&Page=1&N=2010380048+1305520548+1069609639& Submit=ENE&SubCategory=48 $36 PCI-E nvidia cards http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Orde r=PRICE&Page=1&N=2010380048+1305520548+1069609641& Submit=ENE&SubCategory=48 you may be able to find them for cheaper elsewhere.

Re:Minimum for XGL

[Chandon Seldon]

Get a motherboard with intel integrated graphics. It'll run XGL fine on free software drivers.

Forget Expensive Graphic Cards, Here Comes...

[beoswulf]

expensive physic cards, dual cores, and SLI oh my.

Let's see if I understand you

[bufalo_1973]

A render farm that works with graphics can't use the power of the GPUs, isn't it what you say? So, a graphic's render farm must use generalistic CPUs to do the work.

Do you hammer the nails with a screwdriver?

Re:Let's see if I understand you

[heinousjay]

Personally, I use an axe.

lame

[Kortec]

So apparently an in-depth and slashdot worthy review is one that's two pages long now? I wasn't aware that the only important quality of graphics cards was their fps on 4 games. I wish I had known this when I bought my most reecent card, would have saved me so much effort on my research.

Buy a NintendoDS?

[AlastairMurray]

An alternative would be to buy a Nintendo DS and a handful of games you like the look of (maybe some final fantasy and GBA zelda games?). Alot easier to whip out during a free moment.

This is why I jumped of the treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrade this, upgrade that in order to feel like you're getting the most of your game is just tiring and expensive.

That is why I bought a PS2. It's old but new games are released all the time - and I know I get the most of my game!

Gamers

[nurb432]

Games are a waste of time and resources. So i stand by my statement that $300 bucks is too much.

Under rare exceptions its ok, such as if your job entailes CAD or 3D.

Re:Gamers

[Surt]

Life is not all about work. There is room for fun, art, and entertainment.

Re:Gamers

[MikeBabcock]

Gaming is a cheaper and smarter investment than say, going to the movies or watching the boob tube all day.

I know many people who pay $100/mo for high-end digital cable subscriptions. Mine's $20/mo (CAN $) and I spend $$$ on games instead (often used, a year old, etc. to save a little cash).

I've got over 100 hours out of Burnout 3 for the $50 it cost me. $0.50/hr. That's a good cost/benefit ratio to me. Factor in the thousand hours of total game play my PS2 has gotten against it $200 price tag, and we'll notice the investment is still worthwhile.

My wife even approves.

yeah, no kidding

[TTK Ciar]

My usual criterion for the quality of a video card is: "how well does XFree86 support it?" (or I guess XOrg, now). A $50 or $30 card which works well for making xterms and Netscape appear on the screen is exactly what I want (and need).

An advantage to being happy with inexpensive cards is that it becomes feasible to purchase a few of them, so that you can standardize sets of machines on them. That goes double for network cards. It's handy to be able to swap harddrives between machines with impunity, and have video + network "just work" without needing to fiddle with modprobe (or with XF86Config/xorg.conf).

My old crop of machines was standardized on ne2k-pci compatible cards, but I'm transitioning to eepro1000 :-) It's a wonderful world, where gig-e cards can be had for only $50 (or $25, if I wasn't stuck on the high quality etherpros), and 8-port gig-e switches for only $100. My standard video card is still the ATI Xpert98, though. Maybe it's time to restandardize there too.

-- TTK

Mod parent please

[s13g3]

Mod parent informative please - This is good information; I wish more /.'ers wrote like the above author.

It depends.

[jd]

Engineers who genuinely need 3000x2000, or filmmakers who really do need 48-bit colour probably have a need for a very high-end graphics card that supports these kinds of features. So, a generic "forget expensive graphics cards" may not entirely be fair.

What about gamers, though? Those are the people such reviews are generally aimed at, after all. They probably don't. PCI-X has a relatively high latency, but games are real-time - if the data can't get displayed in time, it can produce some really ugly results. This places an absolute limit on the useful resolution you can drive. To do better, you'd want the graphics card to plug straight into the hypertransport bus. Ooops, sorry Intel!

There's also a limit to what typical gamers will have in the way of monitors. I doubt many gamers have monitors comparable to those used by Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic. So even if your graphics card can do better, the rest of your hardware can't.

Finally, there's the gratuitous mark-up factor. Graphics cards don't make much profit, because volume is low. However, shareholders and accountants don't care about volume. Neither do most company directors. They care about what they're able to rake in. A really good graphics card might possibly sell one graphics card for every fifty computers sold, so if they want to strut their stuff and look stinking rich, they need to mark up the boards accordingly.

Personally, I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time, for no better reason than to kick a hole in the overinflated prices. But all due respect should be given to those who need graphics cards far beyond the capabilities of anything a home PC will need this side of 2010.

Re:It depends.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Engineers who genuinely need 3000x2000, or filmmakers who really do need 48-bit colour probably have a need for a very high-end graphics card that supports these kinds of features. So, a generic "forget expensive graphics cards" may not entirely be fair.

Ok. Forget expensive cards unless you have a reason not to. This is most people.

PCI-X has a relatively high latency, but games are real-time - if the data can't get displayed in time, it can produce some really ugly results.

We're talking sub ms latency - nobody can notice that.

Finally, there's the gratuitous mark-up factor. Graphics cards don't make much profit, because volume is low. However, shareholders and accountants don't care about volume. Neither do most company directors. They care about what they're able to rake in. A really good graphics card might possibly sell one graphics card for every fifty computers sold, so if they want to strut their stuff and look stinking rich, they need to mark up the boards accordingly.

Sort of, but not really. Graphic card volumes are low because most people don't really need them. They use what came with the computer and it's just fine. Directors absolutely care about volume - it's part of revenue and determines pricing. The markup isn't gratuitous, it's what the market will bear. It has to be enough to pay for R&D or the company goes under. Lower end cards are priced according to predicted price points so as to maximise revenue.

I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time

This is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You can't make high end graphic cards in your spare time, the time investment is too great. By the time you were ready to mask, nVidia would be selling the equivalent card for $50. This ain't tea cozys.

Re:It depends.

[damiam]

There's also a limit to what typical gamers will have in the way of monitors. I doubt many gamers have monitors comparable to those used by Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic. So even if your graphics card can do better, the rest of your hardware can't.

Monitors are not in any way a limiting factor at the moment. I can watch HD-quality live action videos on my CRT and it looks damn good. No 3D video card is gonna match that any time soon. I don't want ultra-hi-res graphics, I want good graphics at normal resolutions. I'd settle for 640x480 if it meant DVD-quality games.

Re:It depends.

[NMerriam]

Just a note, PCI-X is completely different from PCIe (PCI Express). When talking about the tech specs of either standard, it's pretty important to keep that straight.

Re:It depends.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who uses PCI-X? Most graphics cards are for PCI-Express (PCIe), and you don't want to buy the wrong stuff.

Re:It depends.

[NoMaster]

I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time

This is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You can't make high end graphic cards in your spare time, the time investment is too great. By the time you were ready to mask, nVidia would be selling the equivalent card for $50. This ain't tea cozys.

It's funny because, while reminiscing about a particularly unpleasant time in videocard history, I wondered what it'd be like to do something like this.

You start by doing what every 2nd-tier video card manufacturer is doing - using the nVidia/ATI reference designs. Tweak the internal clock and data timings right out to the limit of the spec, disassemble the reference BIOS and cut out all those pesky bits that look like they'll slow the card down - timing loops, clock waits, etc. Finally, bolt something that looks like a Zalman CNPS9000 to the GPU - after all, if a card fouls 3 other slots and is danger of ripping the bus connector off the motherboard, then it must be good!

Get it made in some Chinese shit-shop, give it a name like "Ling-Lik PenUltima 12000+ Black Taipan Exxxxxxtreme Edition", and slap a $700+ price tag on it. Step (what are we up to - 7?) - Profit!

The thing is, by the time the reviews bagging the product come in, you have made your profit and are busy with your next scam.

(I was going to ask "whatever happened to Diamond Multimedia?", but I just discovered that somehow they're still in the graphic card market...)

Re:It depends.

[Kjella]

Personally, I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time, for no better reason than to kick a hole in the overinflated prices.

Personally, I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own space shuttle, making and renting them out on weekends or other free time, for no better reason than to kick a hole in the overinflated prices.

That makes roughly as much sense, except I think SpaceShipOne is actually closer to both being a cottage industry and to achieving that goal. You're getting hundreds of millions of transistors laid out after countless hours of R&D, placed on a tiny bit of silicon using some of the world's most advanced lithographic equipment, coupled with highly optimized and specialized drivers. All that for the cost of less than 20 working hours = 320$ at 16$/hr (US average). Yes, they are turning a profit but they're not in any way printing money like e.g. Microsoft. Here's a stock statistic from nVidia: Profit Margin: 12.74%. To oversimplify a bit, if we formed a non-profit prices would drop almost 13%. Yep, definately incredibly overpriced.

How about the $150 to $200 Range

[VerusEx]

I just installed a Nvidia 6800 GS, $179 from TigerDirect, and it handles Oblivion at HiRes and High Quality great.

Note the memory differences

[r_jensen11]

For the $300 cards, the ATI has 512MB of memory, while the nVidia has 256MB. Well, I suppose they're comparing the price ranges, and not the closest products performance-wise....

20 patty burger

[asn]

On a dare onetime, I had to go to Wendy's and try to order a 20 patty burger. We had already determined at this point that the double the meat deal really only meant 1 extra patty, so I had to order a "single burger with 19 extra patties" which resulted in a pimply faced reply of "uh.. sir... I'm going to have to get the manager" -- the manager insisted they could not construct a burger beyond 4 patties, even after I said I didn't care whether or not it was properly wrapped. We were actually able to reach a middle ground where he gave me my 4 patty burger and then put 16 other patties in 2 of their plastic salad bowls. We took the burger home, assembled it, took pictures, then deconstructed it into more manageable burgers served on white bread.

What's the biggest burger you've ever made or had made?

Re:20 patty burger

[PayPaI]

In-N-Out 16x16 (not mine)

Re:20 patty burger

[silvwolf]

I see your 16x16 and raise you to 100x100.

Re:20 patty burger

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years ago, there was a burger van on campus that dished up whatever was ordered.

I would go for the triple pinapple and cheese: bunPattyCheesePineapplePattyCheesePineapplePattyCh eesePineappleBun

another popular choice was: bunPattyCheeseSausageSausagePattyCheeseSausageSaus ageOnionsBun

Went back there a while back, but the burger van no longer served starving students late at night. I expect the demise of science degrees and the rise of arts course led to a plague of quiche eaters on campus.

I won't/didn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

I refuse to pay $300 for a cpu and better price/mb hd deals are easily had(drives in the $100 range have good $/mb). If I were to upgrade now I'd get a sempron 3100 for $70 & overclock it to 3700 performance level, which they do easily, and match it with a $150 6800gs(though these are becoming hard to find, 850xt, 7600gt or refurb alternately) and overclock(they like overclocking like mad too) as well.

Expensive Video Cards are a Waste of Money

[JerLasVegas]

If you buy the latest and greatest Video card, you may be able to take advantage of one or two games at most. By the time there are enough games out there to justify the video card, it cost hundreds less. That is like buying a console that cost $600 and there is only one game for it, then the price drops down to $250 and there are 10 more. Unless you have money to waste, it is better to wait.

Bought a nVidia 6800GT when Doom3 came out

[theurge14]

Spent $399 for it at Micro Center. Sure, it was a big improvement over the ATi 9500 Pro I had in there before. But in the long run all i got out of it was the three games I played ran just a bit smoother than before. That's it.

And I'm done with the PC "ricing" subculture. All these wonderful Antec case fans from 2002 are loud, all the money I've dropped upgrading this thing still leaves me with the same crappy Windows XP experience. Think about it, 1GB of Corsair RAM, Athlon XP 2800 processor and two Serial-ATA drives all idle, I click on Control Panel and WAIT 5 seconds for Explorer to redraw my screen twice as all the icons flicker and reload.

Can't wait for my Mac.

Re:Bought a nVidia 6800GT when Doom3 came out

[fontkick]

A Mac? You are in for a whole new world of frustration. Buy the fastest one you possibly can. OSX requires at least 1 GB of RAM and a very fast harddrive to run major design applications reasonably well. I couldn't imagine gaming on the Mac. I'm platform agnostic and I can tell you Windows 2000 on a single processor Athlon XP 3000 is a much more pleasant (as in snappy and responsive) experience than OSX Tiger on a Dual (powerpc) processor G5. Window/screen redraws and web browsing on Windows 2000 is faster than OSX. File navigation on OSX is about the same as Windows, and even then it's pretty slow. Do not buy into the hype. Both platforms have their performance issues. Incidentally, very few applications are able to run natively on the Intel processors right now. That means major slowdowns for at least 6 months to a year while everything transitions to x86 compatibility.

Re:Bought a nVidia 6800GT when Doom3 came out

[theurge14]

I've used Macs professionally for over 6 years now. My experience has been nothing like yours.

Re:Bought a nVidia 6800GT when Doom3 came out

[NeMon'ess]

How much stuff loads up with XP? Norton bloat-ware? Antec makes quiet fans and noisy ones that move more air. If the case fans are actually that loud, they can be replaced. If the noise is also from the fans on your 6800, CPU and power supply, then the problem is you didn't build your system from the ground up with low-noise in mind.

no need to reinstall, theres a trick

[cheekyboy]

I used a cool trick.

Uninstall the IDE drivers to generic MS ones.

Shutdown, do not boot.

Swap HDs/MBs etc... to new system.

BOOT, windows will most likely be happy, and reinit its drivers. It worked for me, moving from
MS-SIS chipset to a MSI-intel chipset (478) Yes im behind, not even the newest MBs, but its still
decent. By the time I need to upgrade at end of '06, there will be better stuff available or current
stuff cheaper.

Yep

[ShakaUVM]

I always pore over benchmarks before buying a new car, err, card.

If I absolutely wanted the best performance, I'd go with the 7900gtx. It has a real speed advantage over the 7900gt. But not a $200 advantage. It's called the price-performance ratio, and it's rather amusing the editors of slashdot have never heard of it before. You get reasonably increasing price and performance together as you move up a chain of video cards, CPUs, whatever, but then that last 10-20% of performance starts costing 150-200% as much. Wow, what a crazy revelation. And according to another slashdot article, you can go Quad 7900GTX now too. So that'll give you maybe +75% speedup over a single card for 400% the cost. It's a crazy, mixed up world we live in.

The main reason I'm probably going to buy a 7900GT is because overclocked versions exist in retail that give pretty nice speedup for only 20 bucks more or so. Search for 7900GTs on Newegg (GL finding them at Best Buy, the salesman looked at me funny yesterday when I asked about a 7900 -- he'd never heard of it), and look at the clock rate line they have for each card. Look for ones clocked in at 520MHz. Those are your best price/peformance cards right now.

For the longest time...

[Wilson_6500]

One of the better video cards I had was an ATI 9500. I got a little screwed on the price--$150 or so--if you only consider the age of the card--it's not so bad if you consider how long I happily used that card (several years). Since I usually don't give a crap about anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, and that high-performance-hit nonsense (I'd rather play at 1280x1024 with a smooth frame rate, even if the textures are a little less sharp fifty virutal feet away), that card served me well even through DooM3.

At the moment, I'm working with an X800XL, which I think I found for around $200. It's not as great of a deal as I thought it was going to be--Oblivion starts to bog down in some areas even though I've tried to tweak the hell out of the thing (and I'm only running at 1280x1024), but it does a great job with Mount & Blade and HL2! (I do wish it supported SM3, but that's not a huge sticking point.)

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[jd]

Last I heard, PCI-family latencies were still over 4ms, rather than sub-ms. (HyperTransport, however, is definitely sub-ms.) Ok, that's not a huge difference, but given the number of cards needed in a modern game (ethernet, graphics, possibly a SCSI card if you need better disk access, etc) it's gotta bite after a while.

$1200 Dollar Setups aren't myth

[Nazmun]

People do have $1200-$1000 dollar setups (crossfired and or sli'd $500-$600 dollar cards). There were at some points graphics cards available for $700.

But pricing and consideration is still pretty damn stable for the last 4-5 years.

$600-whatever: Ridiculous scale of rare ultra high end superclocked and or sli'd stuff.
$300-$500: high end (7900gt-7900gtx, replacing 6800ultra, and 5900ultra).
$150-$200: midrange (7600gt, replacement for 6600gt, and...well nvidia 5k series was mostly trash).
$70-$120:low end for a gamer (7300gs, replacement for 6200).

Where's the CPU beef?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best gaming CPU is arguably still the FX-57, and it will bottleneck ANY 7 series card. It was quite well matched to the 6 series, but GPUs are advancing too fast CPUs right now (I speak only from a gaming perspective, which I am actively involved in). Simply put, anything better than a 6800U is wasted power when paired with any current CPU. I've been scoffing with derision at SLI since the beginning. It can't be justified yet. I hope these people with dual 7900GTXs have a fancy gaming case with a clear panel so they can at least look at their shiny new boat anchors...

Think my 'wow' requirements...

[Junta]

grow exponentially. I.e. Voodoo1 was just unprecedented. Prior to that everything 3D was similar to Playstation 1, unbearably jagged and incredibly geometrically simple.

At 800x600 with a moderate amount of geometric detail, I'm actually pretty well satisfied. Not horribly jagged, and geometric detail is good enough to approximate a decent scene. Back in the days of Voodoo 1, doubling resoultion and geometry was dramatic (320x240 to 640x480 goes a long way toward a smooth screen). Nowadays it probably doesn't quite require an order of magnitude of improvement in specs to make a wow difference, but it takes more than doubling them.

As to HDR, it looks more natural, but still isn't something that overly wows me.

I didn't say the 5900->7900 leap is insignificant, just that I reserve 'wow' for a revolutionary leap rather than pretty much evolutionary improvements.

Missing the Point

[Kichigai Mentat]

If you ask me, I think TechArray missed the point of buying a $500 graphics card. You don't buy a $500 graphics card to play today's games, or yesterday's games. You buy them for tomorrow's games, and the day after that's.

I remember when we got our Gateway (Yes, a Gateway, but it was six years ago, and I was naïve. That and it was the family PC). It was the first new PC we had bought in ages. The P3 500 MHz with 128 MB of RAM, and the nVidia Riva TNT2 w/ 32 MB of RAM seemed excessive for the sprite-pushing games I had on the old Cyrix system (Some unknown clock speed, overclocked to 150, the entire system was made by some unknown manufacturer). Sure, the TNT2 blew away my old copies of Keen (Hell, the Cyrix did that), and Final Fantasy VII (The Cyrix crawled, even at 320x240), but when the then-unknown-for-PC Final Fantasy VIII came out, the card performed admirably. It even did quite well when it came down to emulating a PlayStation at 1024x768 with all effects (except motion blur) turned on.

If I was just going to play the games I already owned, and the games I already knew about, the TNT2 was overkill. A simpler GPU would have been more than enough. But I knew (even back then) that I'd probably have to replace the GPU for newer games and software. In the end, I think getting the TNT2 was one of the better choices on that system.

Thanks!

[timothy]

The 6200 sounds interesting -- cheap and AGP are what I'm looking for, and all my machine is capable of anyhow. Perhaps someone on Philly's craiglist has one for sale, too.

Incidentally, if that doesn't pan out, Amazon's used-goods system is where I might look next. I used it for the first time recently to order several books, and was pretty impressed by the system, especially compared to the last time I used eBay. Nice to be able to place an order with 5 merchants and only pay at one checkout point ... my collection of Penn and Teller books is officially started now ;)

timothy