Stop all the complaining about video card prices

[obeseotron]

Like most people I can't possibly afford a $650 7800GTX 512MB but everyone needs to shut up and realize that the price isn't outrageous. It's only a bad price if it represents a relatively bad price/performance ratio, which this doesn't at all. A 128MB PCIe 6600GT is about $140, if this card is like the rest of the nvidia lineup we can expect the actual price to be closer to $600 after a week or two.

Price (600/140) = 4.29 times higher
Fillrate (550x24/500x8) = 3.3 times higher
Memory Bandwidth (900x256/500x128) = 3.6 times higher
Memory Size (512/128) = 4 times bigger

Take into account the fact that the g70 is more efficient than the nv40 and its derivatives and you end up paying a little bit more than 4 times as much for around 4 times the performance. You could show the same thing with ATI, I just used nvidia because I knew the clocks off the top of my head. Try a finding a remotely linear progression in any other hardware component's price performance ratio. FX57 is 5 times as expensive as a 3700+ and offers 1.27 times the performance. A 500GB hard drive is 4 times as expensive as a 250GB one.

The issue here is that people used to only have to spend $300 to have the "fastest" and now they can't, and that's what they're mad about. It's nice to look at benchmarks and see your card on top, but that's all that it is. The unhealthy part of this is because the expensive cards are such a good deal they present developers with a hard to reconcile gap between some of their best customers who want their video card justified and the larger market who might have a mid range card from a year or two ago.

 

[crazydingo]

Pre-emptive strike? :laugh: :thumbsdown:

Following your logic, future products from ATI & Nvidia will obviously offer more fillrate, memory bandwidth & size so they should price them at $800? Nah, didnt think so.

 

[Lonyo]

It's not about relative cost now, it's about absolutes.
Sure, a top end card costs 4x as much as gives 4x as much performance theoretically as a mid range card, BUT that doesn't mean both the mid range AND high end cards aren't inflated in price.
In the UK there are cards going for £400+ nowadays. When the Geforce 2 (or 1, not sure) was released, prices were maybe £230 tops, according to magazine reviews. Inflation has not caused an almost 100% increase in prices at the top end, we are comparatively paying through the roof for the very top end cards, even if they are not overpriced compared to other cards within the product ranges.

 

[Rage187]

The price of components has gone down(silicon/memory) there is no way graphics cards should cost $650.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

Originally posted by: Rage187
The price of components has gone down(silicon/memory) there is no way graphics cards should cost $650.

r&d has probably gone up.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Rage187
The price of components has gone down(silicon/memory) there is no way graphics cards should cost $650.

LOL... yeah... duh... sand is cheap... just melt it down and viola! Silicon wafer. Then all ya gotta do is put 250 million transistors on it and glue it to a PCB and slap some memory on there and viola! 7800GTX!

Oh wait... who spent $2 billion on the machinery required to make the silicon wafers and put the transistors on and glue it on the PCB and slap the memory on? You mean they don't run that stuff for free to whoever needs it? Who spent $500 million in R&D to figure out how to do that and make it work in less than a year? Hrmm... well... I guess we could find some starving children in Africa to glue the sh!t together for only 50 cents a day... I know! Lets convert that non-profit Save the Children organization into a non-profit video card manufacturer!

 

[DPmaster]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Rage187
The price of components has gone down(silicon/memory) there is no way graphics cards should cost $650.

LOL... yeah... duh... sand is cheap... just melt it down and viola! Silicon wafer. Then all ya gotta do is put 250 million transistors on it and glue it to a PCB and slap some memory on there and viola! 7800GTX!

Oh wait... who spent $2 billion on the machinery required to make the silicon wafers and put the transistors on and glue it on the PCB and slap the memory on? You mean they don't run that stuff for free to whoever needs it? Who spent $500 million in R&D to figure out how to do that and make it work in less than a year? Hrmm... well... I guess we could find some starving children in Africa to glue the sh!t together for only 50 cents a day... I know! Lets convert that non-profit Save the Children organization into a non-profit video card manufacturer!

I like your thinking! What we need to do is get homeless people, prisoners, etc. and start having them assemble these cards. Give those kids in orphanages something to do.

 

[Keeir]

I think there are three reasons why graphics card prices keep rising

#1. Inflation.
Inflation is real and can wield a crazy hammer. Even at an average rate of 3% (very healthy number) a 300 dollar componet would cost in excess of 400 in 10 years. This would be true of all products

#2. Increased R&D
Each generation of products is expected to perform significantly better, on more platforms, and work with more games. This requires skilled labour, and skilled labour is usually expensive.

#3. Oligarchic Pricing Stradegies
The graphics card industry has become a model for oligarchic pricing stradegies that may surpass the old classic, the fizzy drink business. In a relatively restricted Oligarchic enviroment, the remaining compeditors will attempt to simulate monopolistic pricing structures. So what you see is an attempt to create as many pricing groups as possible and an attempt to market skim. Although this stradegy is not unusual in any free market, the graphics card industry often drop prices by 25% a quarter on top tier products. I doubt we will see a resistence to the price climb by either nVidia or ATi unless there exists more compeditors or people stop falling for the basic market skimming...

 

[obeseotron]

Originally posted by: Rage187
The price of components has gone down(silicon/memory) there is no way graphics cards should cost $650.

Yeah, that is why a 20 million transistor graphics processor with 32 mb of slow RAM doesn't cost very much. Believe it or not it is more expensive to design and produce a 300 million transistor chip today than it was to design and produce and design a 50 million transistor geforce 4 and 512mb of the fastest ddr3 you can buy is more expensive than 128mb of 500mhz ddr was then. It's also a lot more expensive to make a few hundred thousand (I don't think they run off more than this many high end cores of any one line) than it is for say Sony to buy tens of millions of them. If there were any scale to the high end graphics market you might get some price relief.

 

[natto fire]

Topic Title: Stop all the complaining about video card prices

Amen to that. I have never spent more than $200 on a video card, it is all about choices. The more bleeding edge(expensive) cards get, the more choices us common folk will have. If you can only extract enjoyment from a game if you are running it at 1600x1200 8xAA 16xAF then maybe you should stick to benchmarking... To the people that just like to run at those settings and have the money to burn on top notch graphic hardware, kudos. You are insuring that competion will remain fierce, which in turn gives everybody more choices for graphics cards. I can't believe there are still people complaining about this when it actually helps everybody out. If nobody bought the flagship cards then development would stagnate, sure prices would be lower, but even less of that total cost would be going into R&D.
:thumbsup: to people that can afford to pay so much for computer hardware.
:thumbsdown: to those that condescend or belittle people who buy budget hardware. (Doesn't happen a lot on this board, thankfully)

 

[IeraseU]

Yes we're being gouged as consumers. However because of the almost 'fanatical' craze over video cards, it's understandable to see the manufacturers taking advantage of this. I'm personally going to be moving over to console gaming for a while primarily because I think they will be a better monetary value for the price/performance ratio involved.

 

[dguy6789]

I think the point is not the price of cards, but the completely crappy performance of the cards relative to the new games.

Back in 2002, I could buy a Radeon 9700 Pro for $399 and run any game from then till 2004 at 1280X1024 max settings with AF and AA in most of them. It is 2005 and a 9700 Pro will still run ALL BUT TWO games at 1024 maximum settings with no aa/af.

Come to current day, where a X1800XT costs way above the $550 msrp and the impending launch of the $650 512MB 7800GTX, and there are games out now that can bring them into sub 30fps areas at 1600X1200 with no aa/af at all. Then the developers want you to SLI/Crossfire them/spend twice as much just to get performance in current games that a $399 card(usually lower) could get in the then current games two years ago.

Either the rate of games increasing in intensity has increased, or the rate of gpu speed increases has dropped.

I say it is the latter. When the 9700 Pro came out, the Geforce 4 Ti4600 was the previous king. The Ti4600 was still $399. The 9700 Pro(the next gen gpu) launched at the SAME price as the PREVIOUS GEN card. Not only did it do this, but it also offered more than two and a half times the speed.

Why has this not happened since?

 

[Topweasel]

Originally posted by: crazydingo
Pre-emptive strike? :laugh: :thumbsdown:

Following your logic, future products from ATI & Nvidia will obviously offer more fillrate, memory bandwidth & size so they should price them at $800? Nah, didnt think so.

No what he is saying right now the mainstream games card is a 6600GT and the 7800GTX 512MB performs 4x as well for 4x the Price. The fact is NVidia and ATI supply cards in just about every price point which leaves the exceptionaly faster hardest to find cards At a super rich price point. The Fact is the Performance between a 7800GT and a GTX is minimal but yet there is a $100 difference, in fact we might even see a bigger diferrence between the new GTX and the old one then we see between the GTX and the GT.

Hey none of us want to spend $650 on a card. But at this price they can release a card that they normally wouldn't have due to production cost. The fact is both companie sell more then fast enough card at that $300 price point to make us all happy. Would you rather be stuck would you rather just have a choice between the 6200, 6600, and 6800, or 6200 64-256MB, 6600, 6600LE, 6600GT, 6800, 6800GS, 7800GS, 7800GT, 7800GTX, 7800GTX 512MB. This by the end of the month these will be releastic cards for the various levels with the GT and Ultra being faised out with the 6800GS and the new unannounced 7800GS.