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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."
You apparently don't need them to get your submissions approved.
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.
Registered Linux user #421033
I'm sure the $500 GFX cards only exist to make spending $300 on a single component of a computer seem reasonable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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 $200 card (which obviously is far more advanced than the one you bought 2 years previously) or continue to play newer games without all of the eye candy enabled.
The price/performance graph for most every imaginable computer component can be represented by a bell curve. It just so happens that I'm in the market for a 300$ 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.
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.
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
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*
It's not often that I go "wow" after a hardware upgrade. 486->pentium 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
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
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
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.
When you can buy the rest of the box for about the same price, spending that much on just video is lunacy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
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
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Easy, you just need a big enough hammer.
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:
[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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
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.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
I just got a new computer with a Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 (already unlocked to 16 pipelines).
I paid $199 canadian for it. The card is absolutely amazing, I get 90fps in UT2004 with max settings at 1280x1024 and around 60fps in Call of Duty 2 and Doom 3 at 1024x768 and high quality settings.
the Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO2 (limited edition) is definitely a special card for the price! Paying a huge chunk of money for 1 graphic card or even more for a SLI setup is just crazy, these mid-range graphics cards perform well enough as it is IMO.
Also on the flip side, if you're going to spend the 200$-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.
I will forever be a student.
"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.
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
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?
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.
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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.