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

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...

[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.

$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: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.

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: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.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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!