why are all the budget cards garbage?

[OS]

Ok, so like another 6 months has passed since I last bitched about this. Cards ~$100 or less still suck. They haven't gotten significantly faster for like almost 2 years now.

 

[high]

I dont think my 9200 was too bad....ran most games at 1280x1024 great but with no aa af...really wasnt that bad

 

[blazer78]

my 9100 kicks @$$ =) , i don't think it suks... i think it'l last a yr or 2 more...

 

[OS]

how do i say this. the budget cards are generally usable, but for the past like almost 2 years or so, they haven't really gotten any faster. I too have a 9100 that i bought like over a year ago for I think ~75. Nothing out there right now is faster at this price point. Hell, I think everything you can buy now at that price is actually a little slower.

 

[VIAN]

That's why they call them "budget."

 

[MichaelZ]

lol, true.

 

[Unrealdude]

I disagree .
radeon 9600 is for 70$ and is hell of lot better than ur 9100
what do u say about that OS

 

[kylebisme]

a 9600 is still about 100$. you can get a 9600se for 70$, but they suck.

 

[Jeff7181]

Just what kind of performance are you expecting from a budget card? I know a person who plays Morrowind on an XP2000 with a GeForce4 MX420... he's a casual gamer and is perfectly happy with his $60 video card.

 

[nRollo]

For the same reason budget everything sucks. (e.g. cars, stereos, boats)
Are you new to this planet?

 

[techwanabe]

Originally posted by: Rollo
For the same reason budget everything sucks. (e.g. cars, stereos, boats)
Are you new to this planet?

Heh! Sounds like if from the original posted question. As the old saying goes, you generally get what you pay for, even though once in a while there is an exception or two.

 

[Cerb]

There has not been a need. There is nothing now that a Ti 4200 can't run pretty well.
It's supply, demand, and stupid users buying FX 5200s.

 

[BenSkywalker]

High end stopped going low end, that killed off most of the sweet spot low end cards. Right around the launch of the GeForce1 DDR there was a switch as manufacturers started pushing the upper limits with their high end parts in terms of available technology. In days prior to that general timeframe high end parts stayed on the market until they were budget offerings, the high priced TNT eventually saw its price drop to the $50 range for a new board, same with the TNT2 and on the other side of the fence the Voodoo3s hit some low prices along with the Rage128s(pretty much everything went real low).

Now the IHVs are pushing fabrication limits and have transistor counts, and more importantly die sizes, quite a bit higher then processors. So now we have high end parts dropped when their run is done and scaled down versions being designed from day one. What has kept the market out of whack for the last couple of years has been the GeForce4 Ti4200. Because of its 'high end' core and its mid tier to low end price it was a major value and one that nV decided to keep around for a while. The competition took a while to have anything comparable and when the part was replaced, it was done with what many would say was a clearly inferior part.

Expect the trend to continue for quite some time(until after the launch of DXNext anyway) until we are nearing feature complete levels on GPUs(which are approaching). We should see a fairly linear increase on the low end starting with the next revision of budget parts, but that is going from a curve with the 5200 and 9100 parts so they are still likely to be quite inferior to today's mid tier boards. Your best bet for finding a good value over the next few years in the $100 or lower bracket is to either find a Ti4200 now, or buy a formerly high end board used when someone else upgrades.