Forget Expensive Video Cards 322
Anonymous Reader writes "Apparently, the $200 in video cards does not produce the difference. While $500 video cards steal the spotlight on review sites and offer the best performance possible for a single gpu, most enthusiasts find the $300 range to be a good balance between price and performance. Today TechArray took a look at the ATI x1900xtx and Nvidia 7900gtx along with the ATI x1800xt and Nvidia 7900gt."
Try $200 (Score:5, Interesting)
Not actually news to me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Me my Mum and I.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The ONLY people who need these graphics cards are people who place top end games. I find it stunning when I come across work desktops for people who do MS Office stuff that have only 512Mb RAM but a graphics card capable of doing Doom3 at decent framerates. 80%+ of people don't need even the 7900GT let alone the GTX and it would take a completely brain dead operating system to require people to have top line graphics cards just to run a word processor....
That of course is where my theory breaks down, Vista... you might not play games... but our developers do.
Re:$300 is not expensive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Skewed results? (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that maximum resolution is the best way to highlight the limitations of the cards. But how many "budget" gamers are going to have monitors capable of running at those resolutions?
All of these cards produce "acceptable" results at 1600x1200. I read the article as "the cards are identical at lower resolutions, but reporting you need to spend more money makes our advertisers happy." Or maybe I'm just cynical.
Re:Not very surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it's more generic than that. If you look at hard disks (because it has such a good metric, but the same applies to all hardware) you'll see $/GB is not lowest at the low end - there's the infamous "sweet spot" in the middle. Same with CPU, the lowest CPUs don't give the most bang for the buck. There's some inherent costs in just producing and shipping the product, which means the lowest are typically really very crippled but not that much cheaper. In terms of absolute performance, mainstream is the best. Of course, that does not mean your utility of the performance is maximized unless it's exactly 1:1 with the dollar value. My parents could get a 7900GTX SLI & 750GB Seagate disks and their utility would be 0 (over their current machine). There's no sense spending money on performance if you're not getting utility, and it makes good sense to spend money where you are getting utility, even if you're moving away from the sweet spot.
Re:Me my Mum and I.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not entirely true. For example, in the mechanical engineering department where I work there's one guy with a really fast PC and a high-end (I think nVidia but I'm not sure) graphics card that does 3-D design and rendering of parts for the automated machine tools on the plant floor. Not that many years ago, he would have had some kind of special "workstation video board" that would have cost a couple of grand. Those have all but died out as the likes of nVidia and ATI have pushed the performance envelope so far that engineering tasks pale in comparison to the requirements of a game. I guess my point is that there are many tasks that need high-performance 3D, they're just not as high-profile as gaming. And even that is a rather small subset of the total number of computer users out there.
Re:Not directly related to TFA (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you game in 1600x1200? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:$300 is not expensive? (Score:3, Interesting)
There hasn't really been a game I couldn't play; I've finshed Halflife 2, all Need For Speed titles, all GTA titles, and so many more...
So why would I need to fork out 300-600 for playing what I can play now, but "better"?
Nothing has felt as sluggish and jaggy as trying to play Blood II with a voodoo2 card. on a P200. Are kids these days spoiled rotten? I had to work to finance my PC-spending, and I still do.
Re:Whatever... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently, this effect has been "applied" to many fields like marketing, sales, negotiation and also in legislative world where a legislator will present a stupid bill that he knows will fail because of the backlash but will make his next bill more reasonable (as we see too often).
Re:Whatever... (Score:5, Interesting)
don't confuse compelled for enabled
people don't want to feel like pigs
they feel like pigs when they get the biggest item
if they take the next-biggest item, they both satisfy their need to serve themselves, and their need not to be gluttonous
also, it's very common that the best value is to be had by taking the second-tier item; the reason is that on a learning-curve pricing scheme, the slope is steepest between items near the premium end of the curve; why a learning-curve pricing scheme applies is beyond the scope of this article, many reasons can be found, and exceptions as well
Re:Not directly related to TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
I have used the ATI out-of-the-box radeon drivers in SuSE, it was pretty much as easy to install as it was in windows. And UT2004 (the only linux game I own) seemed to run just as well as it did in Windows.
So what am I missing that everyone hates so much?
Re:well, (Score:3, Interesting)
I have had burn-outs of the motherboard power connector(s) due to too many cards. Takes hours to fix, one solution I have in place is dual power supplies, takes the load off the motherboard power connectors. Extra hard drives, cdrom drive can be powered by the extra power supply. I just turn on the main power supply first, then the second one, which is fixed with it's own toggle switch and power-on light. That way, the bios knows what to do. Next mod is a big externally powered fan, aimed at the memory bank, keeps it cooler. Comes on with the power strip(s), of which I use two, Monitor on one, PC on another.
I hesitate to use a big graphics card for fear that the power draw would do this setup in. Using a 32 MB card now, the monitor, a Gateway 2000 EV900 wouldn't look any better with a 64 or 128 MB card, or so I am telling myself.
Re:Me my Mum and I.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Bought a nVidia 6800GT when Doom3 came out (Score:3, Interesting)
And I'm done with the PC "ricing" subculture. All these wonderful Antec case fans from 2002 are loud, all the money I've dropped upgrading this thing still leaves me with the same crappy Windows XP experience. Think about it, 1GB of Corsair RAM, Athlon XP 2800 processor and two Serial-ATA drives all idle, I click on Control Panel and WAIT 5 seconds for Explorer to redraw my screen twice as all the icons flicker and reload.
Can't wait for my Mac.
Re:Not actually news to me... (Score:2, Interesting)
After playing a few games I knew this wasn't right and returned it for a full refund.
I immediately ordered a socket 754 MB with PCI-X ( $69 ) and a 7900 GT ( $299 ) from newegg .
The out of the box performance was awesome and overclocking headroom insane.
You may have to reinstall Windows, but you may be able to get away with a restore.
I you aren't too hung up on APG consider this.
I just think the A64 3700+ @ 2500mhz has a lot of life left in it for gaming. My choice was an between CPU upgrade ability vs GPU upgrade ability and I chose GPU. Oblivion is my current haunt. Playing with HDR at 1600x1200 now. Cheers.
Re:Try $200 (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.