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

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.

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.

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?