SPAnDAU sez:
I have a question.
Two years ago, a voodoo 3 3000 cost about $250 CDN. That was the top of the line card, and undoubtedly took a lot of R&D to create. Since then, the prices for the high end cards has steadily increased. Is this because the amount of resources put into developing the chips has increased 5 fold, or is it because they know that they can get us to pay this much?
The V3 was never a top of the line card because it came out too late for the features it had and 3dfx prolly spent relatively little developing it since it was not much different than their previous products and again was relatively uncomplex compared to current designs. However, when you consider that microprocessor companies have managed to maintain prices while doubling performance every 12-18 months then I guess you can expect to pay more when performance increases faster than that. Graphics chips from NVIDIA and ATI are surpassing the complexity of CPU's.
Plus, NVIDIA is prolly not making hugely higher margins on a G3 vs a G2 it is just that it is costing more to maintain the same die sizes for more complex cores and support chips including memory cost more. Also, modern game cards tend to be supplied with at least 32MB of RAM, if not 64. What was a V3 limited to -16? Sure, memory prices have dropped but then new more costly memory is being used now. Throw in inflation and less competition and the fact the hardware is getting ahead of the software and so the lower-end chips are not becoming as obsolete as quickly and so every extra bit of performance or features can be priced disproportionately higher and that new viddy card prices -especially pre-introduction MSRP's as opposed to those in a real competetive market environment -and the prices we have heard should not be unexpected.
Of course I am just pulling this out of my arse and standard disclaimer applies. But it makes sense to me at the moment.
I have a question.
Two years ago, a voodoo 3 3000 cost about $250 CDN. That was the top of the line card, and undoubtedly took a lot of R&D to create. Since then, the prices for the high end cards has steadily increased. Is this because the amount of resources put into developing the chips has increased 5 fold, or is it because they know that they can get us to pay this much?
The V3 was never a top of the line card because it came out too late for the features it had and 3dfx prolly spent relatively little developing it since it was not much different than their previous products and again was relatively uncomplex compared to current designs. However, when you consider that microprocessor companies have managed to maintain prices while doubling performance every 12-18 months then I guess you can expect to pay more when performance increases faster than that. Graphics chips from NVIDIA and ATI are surpassing the complexity of CPU's.
Plus, NVIDIA is prolly not making hugely higher margins on a G3 vs a G2 it is just that it is costing more to maintain the same die sizes for more complex cores and support chips including memory cost more. Also, modern game cards tend to be supplied with at least 32MB of RAM, if not 64. What was a V3 limited to -16? Sure, memory prices have dropped but then new more costly memory is being used now. Throw in inflation and less competition and the fact the hardware is getting ahead of the software and so the lower-end chips are not becoming as obsolete as quickly and so every extra bit of performance or features can be priced disproportionately higher and that new viddy card prices -especially pre-introduction MSRP's as opposed to those in a real competetive market environment -and the prices we have heard should not be unexpected.
Of course I am just pulling this out of my arse and standard disclaimer applies. But it makes sense to me at the moment.
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