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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."
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.
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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.
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.
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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).
>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
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?
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