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

Re:But their drivers still suck

[Qubit]

Amen. I wish the open graphics project the best of luck -- imagine how much better our drivers could be if we had real documentation for our graphics hardware!

What's probably going to happen is that the second that the OGP starts to get a decent graphics card, some of the major vendors will start releasing documentation and/or much better Free Software drivers. And hopefully everyone will benefit.

Sure, since I'm still running 640K ram

[michaelepley]

Cause somebody once told me that would be all I ever need.

Re:But their drivers still suck

[jopsen]

I bought a laptop with an AMD/ATI chip in for this purpose... Only to discover that there wasn't any free driver available for my card...

Which likely makes it the last time I'm not buying Intel... :)

It's still under a TeraFLOPS, marginally

[billstewart]

I remember when we had an array of DSPs that got us a GigaFLOPS worth of horsepower, and could do cool things like ray tracing with it. And that Cray-1, which had 100-250 MLOPS, depending on how much parallelism you could get your programs to use. And even my VAX could support 40-50 users....

I'm actually finding this video-card discussion frustrating, because they new ones all seem to want PCI-Express. My home desktop motherboard does AGP, and none of the AGP graphics cards I can find support 1920x1200; I don't think most of them support 1600x1xxx. So if I go get a decent LCD monitor, I'm going to need to replace the motherboard to support the graphics card...

Re:Once upon a time

[BitZtream]

The whole idea is just wrong. Video cards are not unique as a niche. I can play Crysis fine on a $100 card now.

Nothing has changed. The newest, latest and greatest will always cost more and will always exist. When it becomes common place its price comes down and they come up with something new for the high end. And right about the same time there will be a 'new' game that requires whatever new features it has.

Very few people bought video cards FOR CRYSIS, most people wait until things become reasonable or are just part of their standard purchase.

Nerds and geeks just like to think they are different, we aren't, get used to it.

Most game companies have ALWAYS targeted the common market. Sure they make some high end games, but most have always been for whats common.

Your entire second paragraph has been the norm in gaming as long as I have played PC games. I bought a GUS because I wanted high end sound, eventually everyone could get it at regular prices.

High end games have had flexible settings for as long as I can remember.

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.