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?"

Comments

Once upon a time

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I used to have a top-of-the-line 3dfx graphics card. It was all I ever thought I'd need.

Today, that kind of power is available in my scientific caluclator.

Just goes to show that today's technology will become yesterday's technology in a very short period of time.

Re:Once upon a time

[nbert]

I absolutely agree.

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with some guy at a (rather geeky) birthday party. I asked him about the SLI setup he bought two month ago. He told me that he'll replace it soon because "there are random frame drops when I play a recent game and watch a DVD on the other screen". He was really serious about this. I pretended to be interested for another 3 minutes and left him alone before my urge to punch him in the face became overwhelming ;)

So in other words: I believe that there will be a market for such cards as long as there are enough clueless people who earn enough money to barely afford them. In my experience this target group is pretty immune to arguments - there is no reason to assume that they'll ever wise up...

Re:Once upon a time

[fractoid]

The whole premise is silly and reaks of someone who has no experience in ... well anything really. As I said, every industry has high end stuff adopted by a few, which eventually becomes standard and adopted by the masses. Welcome to the evolution of technology.

I'd think someone on slashdot would at least realize that.

I think the argument here isn't that "there is always a very expensive 'high end' and a more moderately priced and still quite adequate 'mid range'". It's more along the lines of "As technology advances, there ceases to be a 'high end' market for some products."

Look at it this way - when was the last time you bought a dedicated serial I/O card? When was the last time you bought a dedicated sound card, or network card, or firewire card? All of these are now so trivial that they're ubiquitously built in to midrange motherboards, so there is no "high end" market for them any more. TFA is just saying that video cards are next.

Complexity

[sky289hawk1]

It's not merely a matter of what resolution you are running at, but how many polys you are pushing, how many texture passes you are doing, and what shaders you are taking advantage of. As long as artists can dream, we will require more and more power from our graphics renderers.

Re:Complexity

[Dahamma]

At some point we hit a point of diminishing returns on better graphics units... the human eye can only distinguish so much.

But we're nowhere NEAR that argument yet. State of the art movie-quality CG is still not quite there, and you are talking rendering times of hours per frame, not frames per second.

Eventually we'll hit the point where there's simply not enough benefit to be gotten out of an expensive GPU. For me, that time is long past. For others, it may come in the next few years. For a small portion, the 'dreamers', it'll never come... but why would any company spend millions and millions developing new and better chips for such a small market?

Graphics are not the only thing a GPU is used for these days. Game physics on the GPU is still in the early stages, and game AI on the GPU is almost non-existent so far. 3D gaming is still pretty new (and will be niche until display technology improves) and (at least) doubles the GPU requirements.

And who's to say 20-30 years from now we're not projecting stereo images directly onto your retina, or even your optic nerve? I sure hope that is at a better resolution than 1900x1200. We are orders of magnitude away from anything graphics and physics-wise that can fool the human brain.

I can't believe there are so many people here who really think a technology like this is "good enough" today. Have a bit of imagination, and it's pretty obvious (to me at least) that we've barely scratched the surface of 3D computer graphics.

A more expensive card == a bigger e-Peen

[spun]

Therefore, no. The high end will not be going away. Some folks will always feel inadequate and seek to compensate.

Could the world of high-end PC graphics go Away?

[Toreo asesino]

No is the easy answer.

High-end graphics cards are rarely sold because of their real-world in game performance which is often insanely high; too high to notice in any game on release anyway. Nope, in my experience $600 graphics cards is all about bragging rights and benchmarks. It's the same category of people that buy water-cooling and ram chip heat-sinks & fans; they just want to squeeze that last 2% throughput out their probably insanely overclocked systems for the highest benchmarks possible.

It's actually good fun if you're into that; what you learn in overclocking is quite astonishing, but the super-high-end graphics cards are all part of that game.

I once had a $300K SGI computer

[peter303]

Less powerful than these cards.

Vacuum your case out...

[RabidMoose]

Sounds like you've got an overheating issue. Vacuum out the dust, and/or check that all the fans are working. Maybe get an extra case fan.

Re:Agreed!

[trentblase]

True I think. Because if you have a "high enough DPI" then your lack of visual acuity is doing the down-sampling for you.

High-end what?

[mcrbids]

I've been 'into computing' since a '286/20 was described as 'lightning fast'. I've never, ever spent more than 100 dollars on a video card. I've always bought last-years' high flyer for 60-80 dollars and I've never hurt for lack of fun games to play at resolutions that I've ever noticed as a problem.

Last years' CPU on last years' mobo costs 100 dollars for the pair. HDD upgrades for sale at 60 dollars - who isn't happy with this? Your average computer lasts about 4 years, by buying 1 year late you get 3/4 the performance life at 1/4 the cost while staying within the range of the target platform for most of the latest games.

Why is this even a question?

Re:High-end what?

[GiMP]

I would have said that until 1-2 years ago, the best "value per dollar" for video cards was about at $200. This is how much I spent on my first Voodoo2 card and my Geforce 6800. This past year, I spent less than $100 for a card that is arguably better performance per dollar, relative to the demand of the games on the market. So I would agree, $100 is the old $200 in terms of video cards.

Nvidiots are still the same.

[Moryath]

Sorry, but whether you're an ATidiot or NVidiot, the same is true.

I used an ATi board up until I needed an Nvidia back (to get my old VRStandard shutter glasses usable again). Then NVidia fucked me over by making the "new" 3D glasses driver Vista-only and proprietary to their own fucking brand glasses, forcing me to choose between running an old driver (which won't work for certain games) or buying $500 in new hardware AND infecting my PC with Vista.

Bottom line is, if you're not doing something like that, you don't really care whether you have NVidia or ATi. Buy whatever is at the "sweet spot" in the pricing point. The 4770 for $99 certainly is a great price.

Oh, and one other thing to remember - Are you "Okay" with playing in 1900x1200? Fuck, man, I remember when 640x480 was stellar. When 800x600 at 30 frames was something to goggle at. To this day, I run a 21" CRT monitor that does 120 Hz at 1280x1024, I still have a NVidia 7800GS card (though I'll upgrade in a few months finally... after THREE AND A HALF YEARS on my current rig with no tears shed) and that's all I need.

Does anyone "need" 1900x1200? I doubt it. "High-end" graphics haven't been used by anyone but a few people who look more for bragging rights than fun in gaming for years. Hell, what are you going to play on it anyways - all the MMORPG's are still designed to run on 5 year old hardware, and anything "intensive" like Crysis is more of a fucking tech demo than an actual playable game anyways. The fun games, except for the MMORPG's, now come out on the consoles first and maybe get a PC port if you're lucky a year later.

Re:Nvidiots are still the same.

[clodney]

Does anyone "need" 1900x1200? I doubt it. "High-end" graphics haven't been used by anyone but a few people who look more for bragging rights than fun in gaming for years.

I run at 1900x1280, not because I want bragging rights but because that is the native resolution of my monitor and any non-native resolution looks fuzzy in comparison. The fact that I have a 24" monitor running at a high res may make me a pixel junkie, but that has nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with ordinary apps on my desktop.

Re:Nvidiots are still the same.

[linux_geek_germany]

Does anyone "need" 1900x1200? I doubt it.

You don't need a computer at all. You can just sit in a cave and eat whatever crawls below your feet.