Originally posted by: n7
See, i knew someone would come along & say only top end costs alot, but that's not true either.
A 7800GT is still just under $500 Cdn., & unless i'm going crazy, i'm pretty sure we could get the top end cards for that price a few years ago.
Now $500 only gets me lower top end.
Even a mid range card like an X800XL or 6800GT/GS is still $300-450 Cdn., which is still way more expensive than mid range card used to be.
Prior to roughly the GF4/R9XXX timeframe, what basically happened each generation was that the new 'low-end' card took over what had previously been the midrange performance area, the new 'mid-range' card performed a lot like the old 'high-end', and the new 'high-end' card was faster than anything ever seen before. But prices didn't really go up (much); the new low-end card usually cost about the same as the old 'low-end' card, and the performance spread between the high- and low-end cards was generally pretty stable.
There's been an interesting phenomenon in the last few generations of video cards, though -- effectively, there is a price floor at somewhere around $50-75 for new cards from ATI/NVIDIA (I would say due largely to the expense of R&D and manufacturing these days, although there may be some implicit collusion here to avoid getting into price wars at the low end). And the bottom end cards haven't really been getting
that much faster -- but the high-end cards have been steadily and significantly increasing in speed. This means that, to maintain anything resembling the same price/performance, prices for high-end cards have been getting higher and higher over the last few years. Basically, the performance gap between the high- and low-end cards has been growing, and ATI/NVIDIA are either unwilling or unable to drop prices on the low-end cards. And it doesn't make a ton of sense to sell something around the speed of a 6800GS as the 'low-end' part (which is basically what we'd be doing if we were still following the old model of development/replacement).
However, price/performance at every pricepoint has gotten better over the last few generations. I paid $275 for a refurb 9800Pro (admittedly, a really nice Sapphire 'Ultimate' model) a few years ago; right now, I could almost buy a
new 7800GT for that price, and that card would stomp my 9800Pro flat. $500 a year or so ago would have just about bought you a 512MB 6800U; now you can get a
significantly better-performing 7800GTX for around $450. Price/performance has gotten better -- but performance is increasing a lot, and so prices have also gone up.
Dual core CPU pricing is just silly too, especially for anything above lower end, but that i don't mind quite as much due to OCing.
Price/performance on super-high-end CPUs makes ANYTHING in the videocard market look like a good deal. That 512MB 7800GTX might cost $650, but at least it performs ~20% better than the $500 cards (which is almost linear price/performance). An FX-57 (2.8Ghz/1MB cache) costs
almost eight times as much as an A64 3000+ (1.8Ghz/512KB cache), and it's only about 50-60% faster. That's a horrible deal any way you look at it.
Now i do understand these new video cards are insanely more powerful than the last ones, & with heaps more features, but they are still charging wayyyy more than it cost them to make these.
R&D is *incredibly* expensive for 300+ million-transistor processor cores, and manufacturing them is not cheap or easy. The PCBs for modern high-end video cards can rival a motherboard from a few years back in terms of complexity and trace count. And that high-end graphics memory isn't cheap either. Granted, there is still a lot of profit (especially at the high end), but there was also a lot of money put in before the cards ever hit the market.
From what i can see, it looks like there is some behind the scenes cooperation with ATi & nVidia working to scam us all, but of course, i'm gonna be ridiculed for thinking such a crazy thought.
Given that price/performance has still been increasing steadily (even while overall prices have gone up at the high end), and ATI and NVIDIA seem to have pretty fast price reductions when competitive products are available, I find it unlikely that they are explicitly colluding in any meaningful way. I think this is something that people should be aware of, though, since the possibility is there.
However, the fact that we basically have a 2-company oligarchy in high-performance 3D graphics means there is a lot of room for implicit collusion (that is, both companies realizing independently that it is in their best interest not to compete as hard as possible, at least in certain market segments). They're pretty vicious at the top end, but neither company has made huge efforts at cutting prices near the bottom of the graphics card food chain. And the reports that NVIDIA was basically ready months ago and held back the 7800GTX"Ultra" until the X1800XT launched are a little disconcerting. It implies that they're willing to sit on better products if they think it would hurt their profit margins to release them earlier. But I guess that's sort of inevitable when there are only two major players and one of them feels they have the upper hand.
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