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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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
>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