I agree with your point of view. I never go to a movie - unless someone else is paying - because it takes away money that could be spent on computer upgrades or games. I have an entertainment budget that I apply to all entertainment.

$150 for a meal?... if that's what floats your boat, I'm glad you enjoy it. I'm one of the $10 spenders. :P

Not all of us have money to blow. Some people are college students, or *gasp* teenagers, scraping together money for their own computer.

Blowing $600 on a videocard when all you've got is $1000 is a bad idea. It'd be much more prudent spending $600 on a computer. If you maintain the rest as a buffer, then you can pick up whatever games come on sale, and you aren't totally screwed if a part fails.

Since you've clearly got money, go ahead and spend it. You pay the R&D so other people can get things cheaper, later. :P

Modern games lack a way to limit the framerate.

I'd be quite happy at a stable 30fps, but 30fps, 45fps, 60fps, 45fps, 30fps makes aiming more difficult. Especially if it starts fluctuating as soon as the action starts.

It really depends on how the game is built. For lack of a better way to describe it, some games actually have multiple CPU frames per GPU frame. You can fire in the frame that doesn't get rendered - you just won't see it. (or perhaps more aptly, games can have more input frames, so even though you're running at 20fps, you can still have 100fps accuracy, if you can guess where to shoot)

As an example, I tested this in L4D1 when my old GPU was acting up. I had to downgrade from an 8800 to an 8300. My FPS dropped from ~60 to ~15-20. Frequently I'd move my crosshair, click where I thought my zombie was, and when the next frame rendered it was on the other side of a corpse flying through the air.

Of course, L4D2 messed this up by having zombies randomly change directions and speeds, making it much harder to predict where they'll be. Plus the hit detection is just plain funky - at 60fps, I can fire to the left of something running right, and kill it - but it doesn't work nearly as well at low framerates.

Actually, in Crysis 30fps is fine. It's totally playable down to about 20fps.

On the other hand, in a game like L4D or TF2, not having a stable 60fps is going to hurt your playskill a lot.

One other thing to consider - a 4870 is about the same speed as a 5770 - or perhaps 5% faster in a few games. $100 for 4870, or $150+ for 5770? You pick. You pay if you want DX11.

Both cards play almost any game. Something from 2007 and back can probably be played on Maximum. Something from 2010 and forward can be played on anywhere from Medium to Maximum, if you don't mind AA being off, or if you have a smaller monitor.

I was supporting the OP's "Am I a cheap bastard?" question by pointing out (through demonstration) that there are many more people like him.

But of course, I did it without a simple "My thoughts exactly", and instead by adding more info to the thread. A discussion piece, if you will.

Hmm... this post was entirely too analytical. I may be overthinking things. :P

I only spend ~$100 on average on my videocards.

I got a GTS 250 for $100 close to a half-year ago. A friend of mine just got a Radeon 4870 for $100!

Folding seems to indicate the same. nVidia's recent changes to their architecture boosted power consumption, but made double-precision floating point ops about 4x faster. Good for GPGPU, but not so good for games. (which don't really use double-precision floating point)

Yeah, mine too! Zero comments on all of them, except from myself.

Nobody should believe that. The numbers are way off. There's usually 10x as many pirates as copies sold.

The real reason was because Microsoft took them over, and wants a stranglehold on gaming. Around the same time, they started buying up as many exclusives as possible.

Isn't our sun going to be dead long before then?

With an Ubuntu base, almost all Debian/Ubuntu software will run on it, with little effort.

Isn't that a good thing?

I bet we'd have more people with extra senses, if we hadn't burned them all a couple centuries ago. :P

I notice input lag in the sub-30ms range. That's why I disable triple buffering and set Prerender limit to 0, to force my games to spit frames right into the buffer that draws the screen. At 60fps, I want my input lag to be as close to 16.67ms as possible. There's already lag from my LCD changing all the pixels, and lag from my brain registering the change. I don't need any more.

There's a hilarious side effect to this. In some games you can actually shoot near where someone was and score a hit. In TF2 I've headshotted people by firing where their heads used to be. Some games opt to include a 1-2 frame hit detection grace period - I've heard that on consoles, where TVs often have nasty input lag, it can be as high as 6-10 frames. If you're aware of it for the games that have it, you can put it to very good use.

Really? Could you cite some examples?

The impression I got was x264 is one of the best, or perhaps the best one out there.

I see some people criticizing VP8 maximum for only matching H.264 baseline. I have to say... I don't care. I care about encoding time. On modern 6+ core systems, x264 encodes faster than XviD, even with tons of quality settings enabled. If VP8 can encode faster with a similar bitrate, for the same perceived quality, it's useful.