Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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*
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.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
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
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!
everything in moderation
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?