Affordable Modern Graphics Cards

EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."

Re:A mortgage payment!!!????

[Nos.]

You can have my mortgage payment, just send you cheque to...

I agree. When putting together my last machine, I set a limit of what I would spend on a graphics card. I ended up with $200 as my limit. I bought a FX5600 which on my AMD 2500 (oc'd to about a 2800) runs Doom 3 at medium Quality at 1024x768 with hardly a slow down. I'm happy, especially considering the card is over a year old. The folks who spend $500+ on cards must have more disposable income than I, or less brains than my boss.

Re:Rats

[BoldAC]

These cards are being produced at this price and this speed for one reason -- they run doom 3 at an appropriate speed.

They are cheaper because they are not the fastest possible thing on the market; however, they make it where you can run doom iii with all the bells and whistles enabled at a decent resolution.

They are attacking the mid to high gamer market.

Brillant marketing move... if Doom 3 becomes the next standard.

If something else is the next standard and these cards don't run up to par with that game, then this line will circle downward very quickly.

Mac perspective

[MacGod]

I really hope we see these sooner than usual on the Mac. I'm getting exasperated with ATI et al delaying the Mac version of their card by so long (ie: There is still no 9800XT for Mac, much less an X800). Plus, when they do come out, there's usually a $50 premium, and half the RAM. Sigh.

In addition, does anyone know if the nVidia 6600 will be DDL, thus letting people use the 30" Cinema Display? Of course, if you can afford the display, you can probably also afford the card (I can't on either count).

Re:A mortgage payment!!!????

[guppy98]

My mortgage payment is $880 CDN every 2 weeks. The GF 6800 Ultra is listed at $819 CDN. So, it's pretty close to a mortgage payment. This is a good article. Who is going to paying Over $800 (granted CDN) for a video card that will be second or third line in 6 months? I'd really like to hear from people who buy these and how they can justify the cost.

Re:Can't bring myself to buy cheap graphics cards

[The Kow]

Many people who upgrade their computers do it in steps. Usually the largest hump is the motherboard/cpu/RAM upgrade, but the video card, sound card, peripherals, monitor, are often released at different paces, so there's no point trying to upgrade them all at once. I just recently bought my first new sound card in about 3 years, but I've been through 3 video cards in the same time frame, and as many CPU/MB/RAM sets as well. My girlfriend wins out, too - she gets most of the leftovers.

Re:Rats

[HFXPro]

Pixel Shader 2.0? That is Geforce FX area. Geforce 6800's bring Pixel Shader 3.0 (finally turning complete) to the table. I assume ATI cards are much the same way.

Re:Sell for a fraction...

[snuf23]

Well that definately depends on what resolution you play your games on and whether or not anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering are important to you.
I play on a 19" monitor and 640x480 or 800x600 looks very jagged.
I would be interested in seeing what types of framerates you get in Doom 3 or Far Cry on a 9200SE.
I went from a 5600 Ultra to a 6800 GT and was blown away by the difference. Being able to run all of my games in 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 with AA and aniso on is awesome.
Running 1280x1024 in City of Heroes means my screen isn't cluttered with large interface elements. So the res does actually improve gameplay in some cases.
Certainly the importance of high end graphics is dependant on the individual but if all I wanted was 640x480 that Xbox might look better.

Re:Can't bring myself to buy cheap graphics cards

[MixmastaKooz]

$500 rule....after you build your rig, every year afterward, set aside $500 for your upgrades. It depends on what you think was weakest or could be augmented when you built your rig. Every other year, I buy a new video card (200-300) and that leaves me a couple bucks to buy a new HD or peripheral. The other years, it's the ol' MOBO, CPU, and RAM upgrade. Keep to this plan, you won't have to buy a whole new system every three years, and have an above average gaming rig. I've been using the same case and 19" monitor for the last 5 years and haven't spent more than $500 a year upgrading it. I have a p4 2.8 with 1gb memory, 37gb 10k rpm raptor and 160 gb media hd, and a 9600pro (guess what next year is). If you're a college student, then saving money during the summer is key...It's tough to get the money together if you don't have a steady job, but with some discipline, it's the way to go.

Hmmm... GeForce3 Ti500 seems to run it fine.

[Mustang Matt]

Playing the demo through on one notch lower than the absolute highest quality I thought my geforce3 Ti500 seemed to work well. I noticed a couple of times when the FPS was slightly lower than perfect during the cut scenes when they've got people talking and also the guys head was slightly polygonal but overall the quality was terrific and if it wasn't perfect I couldn't tell because it was too dang dark.

Maybe I don't know what I'm missing.

transistor count

[paronomasia5]

is over 100 million on the new geforce cards. that is more than all P4 cpu's, except the p4ee which is 80% cache transistors. so start whining and bitching about cpu prices if you are gonna whine about gpu prices

Re:HEAR HERE

[mikeee]

I'd like to know more (thus the question), but as best I can tell the answer is:

The fastest OS 3D out there, probably by a significant margin, is the Radeon R2XX chip series (8500/FireGL8800/9100/9200). See the DRI page on sourceforge for specifics on the differences.

Intel Extreme 2 is OS and shipping in huge volumes; performance is adequate for mainstream games but only that.

Matrox G450/550/650 series cards have OS drivers, multiport, and good 2D. 3D performance is nothing special, and they're pricey.

Re:A mortgage payment!!!????

[Lord Kano]

Location, Location, Location.

I'm from Pittsburgh, in a nice middle-class suburb you can get houses for under $60k.

If you happen to catch mortgage rates at a low point and you have a decent downpayment, $500 per month on a nice house is not out of the question.

LK

Says who?

[Sycraft-fu]

Hate to break it to you, but some AC on Slashdot doesn't decide what "should" be with bussiness. Their cost is determined by two things:

1) What the market will pay.

2) To a much greater extent, what it costs to make.

It is EXPENSIVE to make those high end cards that push the limit. As time goes on their technology is refined and trickles down. The midrange and low end exist precisely because the high end exists.

Also this is nothing new. $500-$600 has always been the high end price AFAIK. When I first heard about 3d accelerators for consumers, the high end was the Voodoo 2, speicifcally 2 12MB Voodoo 2s SLI'd together. Well guess what? Each one was about $300, giving a total of $600.

But the thing is you don't need the high end to play games. It's there for those that want to spend teh scratch to have the latest greatest. I have a 9800 Pro, which is slower than either of these two cards here. There is no game I've encountered to date, including Doom 3 and FarCry, that isn't palyable on it. For that matter there's no game I've yet encountered that doesn't run quite well on it. Doom 3 runs nice at 1024x768 at high detail, FarCry likewise with most things at very high detail.

Now it doesn't run as good as my friend's 6800 Ultra. He can run them at higher resolutions, with more features like anti-aliasing, and at higher frame rates. However it's not like his $500 card is the minimum to make it work, it is the current best. My older, now low midrange card works fine.

And budget cards can work. You can get a 9600 Pro for around $100-$120 and that will run all games today. Again, you'll have to scale back the detail some more, but they'll still eb perfectly playable, and even look pretty good.

So get off the "There's no reason for the high end" kick. Sure there is: People want it and the technology eventually comes to the rest of us. DVD players did not start out costing $50, they costed $3000. As the technology matured and production went up, costs came down. Graphics cards are the same, but in a perpetual cycle.

In 1988, my computer was an Apple IIGS. It did 320x200 at 256 colours, and had no acceleration. My computer now does over 16 million colours at resolutions in excess of HDTV, and has a massive 3d acceleration subsystem that can render millions of triangles per second.

They both cost about the same amount of money.

This is the reason why

[Hugonz]

This is the reason why modern games are starting to belon in gaming consoles. There, game programmers are targeting the plattform instead of programming and then hoping that HW will catch up. Particularly, I prefer a console that costs less than the video card I'm suppossed to buy to be able to run SuperDuper1stPersonKilla V1.0

Re:who cares about "edges" at all?

[Mojojojo Monkey Inc.]

If "prince point" and getting a good value is your main concern, why wouldn't you at least invest 30 minutes of your time to do some research before handing $50-$150 bucks to get whatever has the prettiest box or slaps "256mb" on the front? Whether a card has 128 or 256MB of memory makes much less difference than most people realize, and there's plenty of bargain cards that give great performance, you just have to know in advance what to look for.

I could've gone to Best Buy ready to part with $150 for a 1-3 year old card and gotten decent performance in older games, but I did some (easy) research and found that getting a Radeon 9800Pro on Newegg.com for just under $200 (shipping included) would give me the best value for the price and would be practically guaranteed to supply decent performance in new games for at least another year or two.

I could've also gone down to a 9600-level card for another $40-70 less if I needed to save some money for groceries... but just like you need to budget in advance for bills & food and all that, there's no reason to spend money on anything without researching first.

Boycott ATI

[vandan]

ATI's drivers are, without a doubt, the WORST quality party of my Linux system. They are SOOOOOOOOOOOO bad. Honestly. The latest drivers are a decent step backwards - there are now horrible rendering bugs in most apps. And of course since it's an R350, the DRI drivers don't support it ( yet, but work is progressing to reverse-engineer it ).

But for people who want a video card for running anything 3D under Linux, you really only have 1 option: nVidia. If you choose ATI, you WILL be sorry.

Re:Why just PCI-E

[X_Caffeine]

Two reasons. First, a lot of those cards are going to be sold to OEMs like Dell, who have already shifted a huge chunk of their systems to PCI-E.

Second, quantities on these new chips are extremely limited; by selling PCI-E versions, they can carefully throttle out the line and avoid making it look like there's a shortage.

Heat?

[gad_zuki!]

Maybe someone can toss me a clue here, but with all these transistors why aren't these things producing much heat? My athlon has a chunky sized heatsink with a fan attached but my ATI 9800 PRO card has a teeny, tiny fan with a thin heatsink. My geforce cards all had small fans. Are there less resistors in GPUs? Does the lower clockspeed allow for GPUs to run cooler?