A $99 Graphics Card Might Be All You Need 618
Vigile writes "With the release of AMD's latest budget graphics card, the Radeon HD 4770, the GPU giant is bringing a lot of technology to the table. The card sports the world's first 40nm GPU (beating out CPUs to a new process technology for the first time), GDDR5 memory, and 640 stream processors, all for under $100. What is even more interesting is that as PC gaming has evolved it appears that a $99 graphics card is all you really need to play the latest PC titles — as long as you are comfortable with a resolution of 1920x1200 or below. Since so few PC gamers have screens larger than that, could the world of high-end PC graphics simply go away?"
Agreed! (Score:4, Informative)
I recently purchased an Nvidia 9800 for around 129 bucks. It came with two Call of Duty games, so I imagine the card is significantly cheaper than that.
It runs everything without so much as a single complaint, on max details.
And is it just me, or does FSAA have little real effect on visual quality? I never have it on, and even with it on (such as in WoW), I can't notice a bit of difference on a 19" LCD monitor. Turning FSAA can save you tons of money (and framerates!)
I noticed this trend as well (Score:2, Informative)
ATI 4830 is a better deal... (Score:3, Informative)
Second, Newegg lists the ATI 4770 as $109 USD [newegg.com] with a 128-bit memory.
Third, the ATI 4830 are a better deal for under $99 [newegg.com] with a 256-bit memory.
Re:Once upon a time (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I think this is true. And I think most game companies have targeted 100$ or less video cards for a while now. But there will always be games like crysis that will allow you to make use of your cutting edge 500$ card. Games can easily be built to 'work' on a 50$ card and still with a few settings tax a 500$ card. There is minimal coding investment compared to other features so people will always want it.
parent not really a troll (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Agreed! (Score:5, Informative)
Well I'm not an expert of any kind, but AFAIK the point of antialiasing is pretty much to compensate for low-resolutions displays. If you have a high enough DPI or a big enough display (and so you can sit far enough away) then FSAA isn't going to make a huge difference anymore.
Re:ATI 4830 is a better deal... (Score:5, Informative)
First, the 4770 is running GDDR5 at approximatly the same clock rate as the 4830 running GDDR3 so they have the same effective memory bandwidth.
Second, while they both have 640 universal shaders, the shaders on the 4770 are running ~40% faster.
Third, so the 4770 has approximately the same or better performance than a 4850 that costs $130-150.
So I think the 4770 is a deal at $109 ... the price will probably come down after the inital rush and the 4830 will disappear.
Re:But their drivers still suck (Score:5, Informative)
Have you been ignoring AMD/ATI for the past year?
They've been releasing documentation on most of their chips lately, and the open source drivers have been making good use of it. The open-source 3d drivers aren't as good as the proprietary drivers, but if open-source drivers are a must for you, AMD is clearly the way to go, and has been for quite some time.
Re:Agreed! (Score:5, Informative)
It exists to compensate for rendering artifacts due to rendering points on a regular grid; having more pixels per steradian (whether due to higher resolution or greater viewing distance) doesn't eliminate the artifacts, though it will, for most kinds of rendering artifacts, make them less noticeable. AA tries to eliminate the artifacts by sampling additional points around the "real" location on the grid and blending them to create the actual value rendered for the pixel.
Re:But their drivers still suck (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, it's not 2001 anymore. ATI/AMD have monthly driver releases, you very rarely hear about issues on the tech websites, and they're opening up the hardware specifications for open source drivers, which will take time to arrive but at least it's a good move for people who want an open source only desktop.
Re:Vacuum your case out... (Score:5, Informative)
I had all the same problems with my Nvidia card and then I looked at NV Monitor and saw that it was running at 92 degree celcius. Turns out the slot cooling fan I was using wasn't helping at all. I removed it and now I'm at a healthy 62.
Of course it also just sounds like a defective card or it's not seated correctly. ATI cards in the past would sort of work if they weren't seated correctly.
These days it seems AMD/ATI is putting out better drivers than Nvidia. It's a nice change to see given that I remember a time when it was the other way around.
Re:Graphics Will Advance (Score:4, Informative)
You're thinking of the T221 [wikipedia.org]. It's a single 22" LCD with a resolution of 3840×2400 and an initial price of ~$20k.
Re:But their drivers still suck (Score:2, Informative)
The open-source drivers are more reliable, easier to use, and more compatible with other software, but their performance is significantly lower than the proprietary drivers.
High-end graphics cards went away a long time ago. (Score:5, Informative)
The world of high-end graphics cards went away a decade ago. Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, and Lockheed all had graphics cards for PCs in the $1000-$5000 range. Ten years ago, I had a $3000 graphics board from Dynamic Pictures. For a while I had something called a Fujitsu Sapphire graphics board on loan; Fujitsu gave up and exited the business before launching a product. And I'm ignoring SGI here.
The high-end guys were run over by the gamer card industry, which had real volume and was "good enough" for high-end animation tools. "High end" today is a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand.
The big headache for the animation community has been insufficient graphics memory. Gamer cards tended to stress fill rate over texture memory. Nobody in animation cares about frame rate once it passes 30FPS. What you need for animation is plenty of space for big textures. Game textures are shrunk to fit, but that happens late in the development pipeline. During content creation (and for movie and TV work) you need much larger texture maps. A few gigabytes of texture memory would not be too much. For most of a decade, you couldn't get that on PCs. Finally, you can.
Re:Nvidiots are still the same. (Score:3, Informative)
If free drivers are really a concern to you, you might consider helping out with a project that is working to develop a graphics card that itself is open source.
http://www.opengraphics.org
Consider making a donation to help out developers:
http://linuxfund.org/projects/ogd1/
Re:Nvidiots are still the same. (Score:3, Informative)
And if you were using agile tech, rather than static LCD, this wouldn't be a problem!
Re:Vacuum your case out... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Once upon a time (Score:2, Informative)
The 7900 and 8800 GTS are by no means high end.
Recent high-end nVidia cards:
6800 GT / Ultra
8800 GTX/Ultra
GTX 280
For ATi, we're looking at:
9800 Pro / XT
2400 Pro
4850
Anything else is binning, marketing, or slapping two on one card.
ALWAYS get the flagship. For nVidia, this means buy the one with the most 8s in the name. The same holds true for their chipsets.
Re:It's still under a TeraFLOPS, marginally (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nvidiots are still the same. (Score:3, Informative)
I entered it wrong - 1920x1200 was what I meant.
Re:Vacuum your case out... (Score:3, Informative)
But once it's up, it generally doesn't have a problem. It's only on initial boot that it's generating these problems. That's why a temp issue seems unlikely.
I've fought the same issue several times on several unrelated homebuilds. Each time it was a motherboard issue. Most likely, your motherboard has microscopic cracks, caused by uneven thermal expansion once upon a time, but when the board heats up everything is fine.
If this is the case, your computer will stop working entirely in a week or three, and not be able to complete POST.
It looked like a vid card issue to me the first time, but after endless gyrations swapping the motherboard fixed it entirely. Next time I saw the issue, I just blindly swapped the motherboard and it went away.
Re:Nvidiots are still the same. (Score:3, Informative)
I really do need at least 256x240 for playing games. [like Megaman]
Not the only Amazing ATI Card (Score:3, Informative)
Greed may be good, but competition is much better!
Re:But their drivers still suck (Score:1, Informative)
They have a fix. http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2064&p_created=1177972007
Re:Once upon a time (Score:3, Informative)
I was raised there, too. I remember seeing one through the back yard fence . . .
hawk, whose parents moved from San Francisco to sleepy little San Jose to raise him, unaware of what Shockley was up to at the other end of the valley . . .
Re:Once upon a time (Score:1, Informative)
You seem to be off by a bit. The GTX 285 is the current best-performing single card from nVidia, and the 4850 shouldn't even really be considered high-end since it's basically a budget 4870 (which itself has since been replaced by the 4890 as the single-card performance leader for ATI).
Anandtech [anandtech.com] has [anandtech.com] a few [anandtech.com] reviews with some nice spec comparison charts for most of the current models, with more details in the articles they're attached to.
Re:Once upon a time (Score:3, Informative)
$300 [vintage-computer.com]
Re:But their drivers still suck (Score:3, Informative)
OK, then. I installed it in Windows XP and tested, just for you. Same computer, of course, but with a more recent version of ioquake3; same resolution and everything. 192 fps. So it's faster in Windows, as I expected. I'm not going to bother with fglrx.
122 fps was with the old radeon driver, as radeonhd doesn't work for me. The OpenGL performance for the two should be pretty much identical, though, as they both use the same Mesa and DRI.