Nvidia Unveils New Mid-Range GeForce Graphics Card 158
crookedvulture writes "Nvidia has uncorked another mid-range graphics card, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Every tech site on the web seems to have coverage of this new $250 offering, and The Tech Report's review will tell you all you need to know about the various flavors available, including how their performance compares to cards from 2-3 years ago. Interestingly, the review concludes that pretty much any modern mid-range graphics card offers smooth frame rates while playing the latest games at the common desktop resolution of 1920x1080. You may want to pay closer attention to power consumption and noise levels when selecting a new card."
Re:Mid-range? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends how you define mid-range. Steam has a nice breakdown of actual graphics cards used to play their games: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ [steampowered.com] Keep in mind that these stats are for players, the actual market is much more low-end that that.
So $250 would be about in the top 5% of the gamers' market, 1% general market ?
Re:1920x1080 is considered common these days? (Score:4, Informative)
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&sku=224-8284 [dell.com]
(Dell, 27" U2711, 2k resolution (2560x1440)
Frequently on sale for $800.
Or did you need 2k vertical? That's going to be much harder to come by.
Re:Mid-range? (Score:5, Informative)
Video cards seem to be the one aspect of computers that doesn't follow both Moore's Law and the cost reduction model that we've seen elsewhere.
How do you mean? Moore's law is all about transistor density - the fact that Nvidia maintains specific price points and varies performance to compete is irrelevant.
Re:Mid-range? (Score:5, Informative)
You should look at the chart again. The top two cards of each graphics series is going to be in the $200 and up range when purchased, so tallying those up from the December survey, you get somewhere around 45% of the users. Significantly higher than the 5% you seem to have pulled out of nowhere.
Now what is the general market? The people who are going to buy their own graphics cards are going to be professionals doing 3D or computational work, gamers, and HTPC builders. Everyone else is going to stick to their integrated Intel graphics and be none the wiser. The HTPC market is going to buy all low end stuff, the professional market is going to buy primarily high end stuff, and the gamer market, according to that survey, seems to be right in the middle of that price range. For people who actually would buy a video card, which is the only market that matters to video card manufacturers, $250 indeed does seem to be mid-range.