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A $99 Graphics Card Might Be All You Need
Vigile writes "With the release of AMD's latest budget graphics card, the Radeon HD 4770, the GPU giant is bringing a lot of technology to the table. The card sports the world's first 40nm GPU (beating out CPUs to a new process technology for the first time), GDDR5 memory, and 640 stream processors, all for under $100. What is even more interesting is that as PC gaming has evolved it appears that a $99 graphics card is all you really need to play the latest PC titles — as long as you are comfortable with a resolution of 1920x1200 or below. Since so few PC gamers have screens larger than that, could the world of high-end PC graphics simply go away?"
That is NOT what he's saying at all. He's saying that 'high end' will be reasonably priced. We will surely continue to move forwards but the market is targeting a 100$ video card group and will continue to do so in future. Less games like crysis will be released that require you to spend 300$ on a video card.
Personally I think this is true. And I think most game companies have targeted 100$ or less video cards for a while now. But there will always be games like crysis that will allow you to make use of your cutting edge 500$ card. Games can easily be built to 'work' on a 50$ card and still with a few settings tax a 500$ card. There is minimal coding investment compared to other features so people will always want it.
Hmm ... do you use linux for your gaming/graphics needs? I've only had headaches when I've been futzing around with ATI cards on one of my linux boxes. Configuring them sometimes requires a bit of xorg.conf knowledge and it never seemed to perform as well compared to running on a windows machine. Nvidia, however, tends to have good linux support, thus teaching me a lesson about buying a gfx card for a particular os. Even if they're more expensive, I'd rather shell out the extra 50$ for some decent firmware support than get something which sometimes works.
Well I'm not an expert of any kind, but AFAIK the point of antialiasing is pretty much to compensate for low-resolutions displays. If you have a high enough DPI or a big enough display (and so you can sit far enough away) then FSAA isn't going to make a huge difference anymore.
First, the 4770 is running GDDR5 at approximatly the same clock rate as the 4830 running GDDR3 so they have the same effective memory bandwidth.
Second, while they both have 640 universal shaders, the shaders on the 4770 are running ~40% faster.
Third, so the 4770 has approximately the same or better performance than a 4850 that costs $130-150.
So I think the 4770 is a deal at $109 ... the price will probably come down after the inital rush and the 4830 will disappear.
Have you been ignoring AMD/ATI for the past year?
They've been releasing documentation on most of their chips lately, and the open source drivers have been making good use of it. The open-source 3d drivers aren't as good as the proprietary drivers, but if open-source drivers are a must for you, AMD is clearly the way to go, and has been for quite some time.
It exists to compensate for rendering artifacts due to rendering points on a regular grid; having more pixels per steradian (whether due to higher resolution or greater viewing distance) doesn't eliminate the artifacts, though it will, for most kinds of rendering artifacts, make them less noticeable. AA tries to eliminate the artifacts by sampling additional points around the "real" location on the grid and blending them to create the actual value rendered for the pixel.
I had all the same problems with my Nvidia card and then I looked at NV Monitor and saw that it was running at 92 degree celcius. Turns out the slot cooling fan I was using wasn't helping at all. I removed it and now I'm at a healthy 62.
Of course it also just sounds like a defective card or it's not seated correctly. ATI cards in the past would sort of work if they weren't seated correctly.
These days it seems AMD/ATI is putting out better drivers than Nvidia. It's a nice change to see given that I remember a time when it was the other way around.
The world of high-end graphics cards went away a decade ago. Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, and Lockheed all had graphics cards for PCs in the $1000-$5000 range. Ten years ago, I had a $3000 graphics board from Dynamic Pictures. For a while I had something called a Fujitsu Sapphire graphics board on loan; Fujitsu gave up and exited the business before launching a product. And I'm ignoring SGI here.
The high-end guys were run over by the gamer card industry, which had real volume and was "good enough" for high-end animation tools. "High end" today is a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand.
The big headache for the animation community has been insufficient graphics memory. Gamer cards tended to stress fill rate over texture memory. Nobody in animation cares about frame rate once it passes 30FPS. What you need for animation is plenty of space for big textures. Game textures are shrunk to fit, but that happens late in the development pipeline. During content creation (and for movie and TV work) you need much larger texture maps. A few gigabytes of texture memory would not be too much. For most of a decade, you couldn't get that on PCs. Finally, you can.