Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
Therefore, no. The high end will not be going away. Some folks will always feel inadequate and seek to compensate.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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 $600 graphics cards is all about bragging rights and benchmarks. It's the same category of people that buy water-cooling and ram chip heat-sinks & fans; they just want to squeeze that last 2% throughput out their probably insanely overclocked systems for the highest benchmarks possible.
It's actually good fun if you're into that; what you learn in overclocking is quite astonishing, but the super-high-end graphics cards are all part of that game.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Yes, but turning japanese can save you child support payments. I really think so.
Oh... I see... you accidentally the whole thing.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Hmm ... do you use linux for your gaming/graphics needs? I've only had headaches when I've been futzing around with ATI cards on one of my linux boxes. Configuring them sometimes requires a bit of xorg.conf knowledge and it never seemed to perform as well compared to running on a windows machine. Nvidia, however, tends to have good linux support, thus teaching me a lesson about buying a gfx card for a particular os. Even if they're more expensive, I'd rather shell out the extra 50$ for some decent firmware support than get something which sometimes works.
Meh. I still like Oregon Trail, it's a great game and runs great on reasonably modern kitchen appliances. Though hooking up a UI can be difficult.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"could the world of high-end PC graphics simply go away?" I wish it would! I'm tired of carrying around all this envy directed at people with the kind of coin required to buy top-of-the-line graphics cards. I got a wife and kids to support!
Haha tremble before my single childless income.
...so lonely
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.
I still have grill marks on my arm from playing Oregon Trail on my George Foreman grill. I think one of the members of my party got bit by a snake, but I am not sure.
I am going to build a new PC and am in the market for a card. $100 on the graphics card would give me welcome flexibility on other components. Does anyone know if this can run Nethack at full res? What if you overclock it?
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Less powerful than these cards.
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.
There are many untapped aspects of graphics. Showing a multiple-screens, multiple-angles viewpoint better is in immediate demand, but really high dpi, dots per inch, has yet to be available to budget PC users. Several years ago, IBM was reported to have monitors that have a resolution equivalent to what you find on the printed page. With that kind of resolution, a typical small laptop screen should fit inside 1 square inch with room to spare. I don't know if this is CRT technology rather than LCD, but higher resolution could be around the corner.
After 2D, there's 3D, and real time 3D. So keep buying better graphics, and there will be even better graphics coming.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
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.
True I think. Because if you have a "high enough DPI" then your lack of visual acuity is doing the down-sampling for you.
Reminds me of the guy in my wife's office who kept a window unit AC sitting (and running) on his shelf. His office had no windows.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Like Nvidia's are any better. They haven't had flat panel scaling working for I don't know how long.
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?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Meh. Go render yourself a girlfriend. It's what the rest of us do.
I tried that but we have nothing in common so she dumped me.
I accidentally your mum.
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.
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.
I think we've reached a point where
- graphics are no longer a limiting factor for a game's enjoyment. Wireframe spaceships sucked. 100.000-polygons ones instead of 10.000-polygons ones probably don't make a huge difference. On the contrary, too many moving things actually distract. We can go "more lifelike", and blend (pun inteded) the boundary between games and films, but still...
- graphics costs are ballooning, both in terms of creating the ressource files, and programming all the candy/actions. At the same time, the attention is moving to other topics (IA...), and budgets are tight.
- there's probably a limit on how big a PC screen, and how small the dots on it, can be. Actually, most LCD screens don't even render all that many colors anyway.
Which explains why nVidia in particular is desperately trying to find other uses for a GPU. They are the only of the big 3 that don't have much else in their portfolio.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.