Nvidia Launches New Affordable GPU

mikemuch writes "Today Nvidia unveiled a new low-cost, high-power graphics processor SKU. ExtremeTech's Jason Cross has done all the benchmarking, and concludes ' This makes for an impressive bargain and a huge step up from the generic GeForce 6800. The big question: How will this fare against ATI's similarly priced X1000 series card, the Radeon X1600 XT?'"

This is insanse

[PoderOmega]

We are often asked "Which video card should I buy?" We always answer with "well how much do you want to spend?" The inevitable reply is that everyone wants to run all the latest graphics-heavy games at high resolutions with all the features enabled, but they only want to spend $100 to $150 to do so. Sorry to say, but that's just not going to happen. The real sweet spot for graphics is in the $250 to $300 price range.

I cannot express how frustrating this is. People, please do not spend more than $150 on video card. This is just insane. I guess we do need people like this to keep the graphics market hot by paying $300 for a card. I just hope game manufactures don't think that their games should require $300 cards.

The Irony!

[Zemplar]

Design goals:

1. CPUs: High cost, low power
   
2. GPUs: Low cost, high power

Granted this is a rough approximation, but it seems that GPUs are destined to waste all the power [watts] modern CPUs are saving.

Video card naming schemes: CONFUSING

[Work Account]

I wish video card makers would be more CLEAR when they decide on names for their cards.

We are one step away from having "Nvidia Model 8912347892389110".

For lay men like myself who buy a new video card every few years, it is hard knowing what is what in the video card market since the names are very confusing i.e. 6800 GS vs. X800XL vs. 6800 GT.

Discuss.

i agree

[Anonymous Coward]

i have never paid more than 150 for a video card and have gone long periods of time with out upgrading. $150 USED to be the sweet spot for price/performance now its 250-300$ like they point out. lame. anyways don't be fooled by the hype. you don't need a $300 card.

Re:This is insanse

[IntergalacticWalrus]

What I always say about this: if it costs more than the current game consoles, it's too much.

Though I guess I might have to change my reasonning soon, seeing Sony and Microsoft appear to be aiming quite high in their next generation...

Re:This is insanse

[Buddy_DoQ]

What else are young gaming geeks going to do with their money? They live at home in mom and dads basement with 100% disposable income; 300 bucks for a new GPU is nothing. It's a hot-rod culture, rather than mustang parts, it's computer parts.

$250

[RCVinson]

$250 makes for "a new low-cost, high-power graphics processor"?

Re:This is insanse

[rovingeyes]

I just hope game manufactures don't think that their games should require $300 cards

Simple - OEM pressure. I can confirm this because I have a friend who works for Microsoft and I asked him why is that every year we are forced to upgrade. Can't you guys do with what is already available? He told me that they can optimize the systems to run far better on existing hardware but the OEMs don't like that. Dell apparently wants users to upgrade every 2 years or so. Bottom line - they don't care about end user. They know that the end user will spend to use the latest and greatest software.

Warning: story submitted by hardcore gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

...because no other standard-model human being would consider a $250 video card to be "affordable". Hint: for non-powergamers (including most geeks) "low cost" GPUs stop in the vicinity of $100.

Agreed WTF?

[bogie]

$250 is a new breakthrough in affordability?

I was naively waiting to read about a $100 gpu that performed well enough to play today's games at lcd resolutions.

When you can build a very fast system with everything sans gpu for $400-$500 spending more than half the system cost on a single component sounds fucking stupid.

Re:Uninformative: Here's a summary

[aywwts4]

I think this shows everything thats wrong with the tech review industry. They Adver-review cards pretty much only for kids to drool over and feel bad about their existing card that works just fine on pretty much every game they play; and 'Enthusiasts" IE, one born every minute.

Instead of working as a consumer reports type site, where If i want to buy a good graphics card for my ~700-1100 dollar computer (Not my 4 grand alienware) I would be digging through archaic reviews from a few years ago with test results on old drivers.

Wow, this just in, a 700 dollar card dual SLI card can play games at resolutions larger than my monitor can handle, at colour depths the human eye can't discern, at a framerate so fast the human eye doesnt pick it up, on a game that probably wasn't made to take advantage of the card, and with an actual visual performance increase I can barely notice. But the good news is I smoke em when I run a benchmark utility.

Re:Video card naming schemes: CONFUSING

[Txiasaeia]

Gah! Wish I would have found that site *before* I ordered a new video card on Saturday! Excellent, excellent site! Wish I had mod points.

Your comment is woefully obsolete

[FreeUser]

Disclaimer: I make extensive use of both nvidia and ati hardware under GNU/Linux.

Nvidia is really the only way to go for 3D in linux. If you really only need 2D, I've heard good things about the old Matrox cards, but good luck finding one.

Not true. The proprietary ATI drivers (currently version 8.18.8) work as well as the nvidia drivers on both my amd64 and x86 boxes. Nvidia works fine (except for incessent flickering at 1920x1200 on one machine), as does ATI (but no flicker on that one machine). ATI works better ati 1920x1200@60Hz, but nvidia draws specular hilights on a celestia-rendered hi-res Earth better that ATI. In short, its a wash, with each manufacturer/driver having strengths and weaknesses the other does not.

The choice these days is one of personal preference. Your comment is at least a year behind the current state of the art, at least in the GNU/Linux world.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Uninformative: Here's a summary

[phalse phace]

Or, you could just buy the 6800GS for $229 [monarchcomputer.com] and save $100 to use toward your next GPU upgrade, which I think is smarter.

Re:Uninformative: Here's a summary

[level_headed_midwest]

Yeah, no kidding. I am *very* used to running games at moderate detail and with all of the AA/AF turned off as I have Jurassic-era equipment by gamer standards (P4-M 2.2 GHz running a AGP 4x Radeon 9000 64MB.) It does not make that big of a difference to me anyway as it looks nice, but in a FPS game, do you just stand there admiring the scenery? No! You run around and shoot the bad guys.

And I laugh any time I see people doing CPU framerate comparisons at 640x480 or 800x600 with everything dialed down and judge CPU #2 a winner because it got 447 fps and CPU #1 only got 432. You honestly can't see anything over the refresh rate of your monitor (85 Hz top-end, generally 60Hz for an LCD) so you waste most of your huge framerate anyway. Shooter games are playable for me as long as the framerate is about 30-35 fps or so. Movies and TV are shot at 24 fps!! and few complain about flicker in them.

I think that the entire gaming industry is just set up to take advantage of suckers that will buy $900 sets of SLI graphics cards, $1000 CPUs, and super-expensive high-frequency overclocker RAM. Almost makes me wish I had invested in ATI, nVidia, AMD, or Crucial so I can take $1500 in dividends and buy a very usable computer that will last me four or more years.

Another BS article about yuppies with too much $$$

[tomstdenis]

I bought a 6600 PCI-E for 179$. Why did I buy a 6600 PCI-E for 179$?

It was the cheapest "non-crap" PCI-E from nvidia I could find. And you know what? It plays Far Cry, Thief3, Battlefield2 and the others JUST fine.

This bullshit article about "needing a 6800GT to enjoy the games" is just that. Bullshit. Sure the game may look shinier at 1600x1200 with 200fps and a billion texels/sec or whatever ... But if that's what it takes to make the game "fun" we're obviously not playing the same games.

Point is this article is all about selling the latest bullshit cards you don't need. A 6600 will do you just fine if you're an average gamer [e.g. you have REAL work to do the rest of the day], it can play games at 1024 and 1280 reasonable well [very well at the former].

If you're on a budget and you think you need to spend 250$ USD [keep in mind 179$ I'm talking about is Canadian not USD] to enjoy games ... you need a few moments of education :-)

This is just a press release disguised on a 30 page article [chalk full of ads no less] to sell the latest and greatest...

Tom

what is the alternative?

[GunFodder]

I've been tracking video card reviews for years. Typically the performance of a GPU doesn't change much subsequent to its introduction. What would be the value in doing a subsequent review?

Most of the top review sites keep a generation or two of older chips in their comparisons. Some even compile regular guides on value and midstream priced parts. If you can't find information on cheaper video cards then you aren't looking hard enough.

Re:No AGP!

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I'm sorry, but I will not swap out my CPU and motherboard just so I can install faster cards only available in PCI-E.

You will eventually. ATI just decided to stop supporting our shrinking market segment.

Re:Another BS article about yuppies with too much

[Chandon Seldon]

The 6600 isn't a bad card, and if you're on a budget I'd totally recommend it. On the other hand, you can get significantly better performance for more money.

Now, I'm not saying that these games aren't fun at 1024x768 with dynamic lighting turned off, blob shadows, and "medium" resolution textures, but it's still like the difference between watching a movie on an old television versus seeing it in a theater.

If you have the money, you can make your games look significantly better for the price of two games. Why *wouldn't* you do it?

Re:Another BS article about yuppies with too much

[ionpro]

Ah, but enjoyment is relative, isn't it? I average about 30 minutes per day of Battlefield 2, and occasionally will play through another game (I'm on interval 2 of FEAR right now). My previous system was an Athlon XP 2500+ w/ a gig of RAM and a 6600GT AGP. While it ran the game at 1280 (my LCD's native resolution), when involved in firefights my minimum framerate typically dropped to below 10 frames per second. It just got too frustrating for me to be continually killed, not because I lacked the skills (trust me, that happens often enough), but because my system couldn't handle it. Along with many other things (a flash website I'm forced to use maxing my CPU and causing winamp to skip, Eclipse taking 20+ seconds to start for my development work, etc.), I upgraded to a Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 gigs of fast RAM, and a X800XT All-in-Wonder AGP. Let's assume I'll use this computer for 3 years, and upgrade the video card once during that time:

Amount I spent on the computer: $1061 + $257, including shipping.
New video card in 1.5 years: $250
A total cost over 3 years of $1568.

That means, to increase my minimum framerates to 60fps now and 30fps over the entire duriation, I spending an average of $1.43 per day on my computer (this is assuming that the computer becomes completely worthless to me after 3 years, which is absurd, but let's go with it). Let's further assume that my developer time is worth $25 per hour (actually considerably more), and that I start Eclipse 5 times per day, 5 days per week (probably an underestimate). The new computer (it comes with a faster hard drive, too) starts Eclipse in about 4 seconds. I save an average of $0.55 per day from that enhancement alone. Assume that my total productivity is in Eclipse, and that's the only benefit I get from the new computer besides gaming (it's much quieter, it comes with far better warranties, it's less then a third of the weight of my previous computer, is smaller, and comes with a TV tuner allowing me to save desk space). I'm still paying only $0.88 per day on gaming (not including the price of games). You may have done this analysis on your own and determined that it wasn't worth $0.88 per day for your enjoyment. Personally, I find that an emminently resonable amount to spend on entertainment. It's less then I would spend on cable; less then I would spend on seeing a movie a week at the local cineplex.