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Performance for our money

Radiation

Radiation

Radiation

Soldato
Joined
12 Oct 2003
Posts
4,027
Do we get as much performance for our money now compared to past generations?

Perhaps it's just my imagination but it always felt like buying a £180 to £250 card was quite high end just as little as two or three generations ago, you could usually expect 60+ fps minimum in the latest games at high settings but nowadays benchmarks seem to say otherwise and you have to pay a lot more to get back up to that level, this is especially odd considering consoles have held things back a bit.
 
a current £200 card can run anything out at the moment with 60fps 1080p no problems, can't it?

and GTX 460 for £100 is an absolute steal.
 
Agreed, a 2 gig 6950 at around £200 or even a 1 gig 560Ti at £170 will still cope with pretty much everything on high at 1080p

Edit: N.B. A lot of the reviews now seem to insist on running things on max (Ultra with AA etc) when in reality theres no need
 
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Radiation said:
Perhaps but that's not what a lot of benchmarks seem to say, also is it unreasonable to expect the performance of a 580 for £250?
Click to expand...

As I said most reviews now are run at max/ultra, where as in reality high is enough for 99% of people
To part 2, largely yes, if you could get that performance for that price they wouldnt be able to charge more for the high end cards, it would be doable by xfiring/SLIing 2 last gen cards, eg 2 x 5850 or 2 x 460 would prob cost around that and give that level of performance, but I personally prefer single high end card to 2 mid/2 last gen
 
There has been a bit of upwards price creep with graphics card, and this trend seems to be continuing. What I'm worried about is if 7970s come at 400+ then when NVIDIA releases kepler they'll see reason to price it even higher, at beyond the 500 mark.

Hopefully economics 101 - supply and demand - bring prices down. But it seems more and more people are willing to pay extortionate prices for graphics cards these days.
 
The high end shouldn't really be going above £300, that's crazy money for what graphics cards can do, imagine if the 2500k was priced at the level we see high end gpu's, i don't get how they justify it.
 
Look at the cost of the 3930/3960s, theyre stupid money, you have to pay a premium to get high end, always have and always will, £200 is a good solid mid range enthusiast card
 
Wouldn't it be better if they sold more high end cards for less to more people and ditched the low end, im sure they would sell just as many but people would benefit from higher performance, they're going to sell just as many cards as always but this way everyone wins, the materials are the same year after year.
 
I think that AMD started to open up a new price bracket in the 6 series, which may explain the significant rise in price of the 6950/6970 cards. Nvidea have been pricing quite high (in comparison) on the whole in recent years I think.

I quite liked the AMD marketing model of recent years where they would build cards within certain power envelops and at given price points, although I have never been a fan of artificially crippling good chips so they can't unlock good shaders etc. Looks like they are moving away from that model anyway.

If you want to bring pricing down the best thing to do would be not to buy new gen, I'll be going second hand if a 7870 is priced as silly as the 7970.
 
I'm very much hoping that the new 7900 series cards are overpriced so much that they sell no more than a few. This will send a message that the paying public won't be bent over when it comes to new products and hopefully they'll get a significant price reduction in February or March. Can't see it happening though and demand will probably outstrip supply for a while.
 
Radiation said:
Do we get as much performance for our money now compared to past generations?

Perhaps it's just my imagination but it always felt like buying a £180 to £250 card was quite high end just as little as two or three generations ago, you could usually expect 60+ fps minimum in the latest games at high settings but nowadays benchmarks seem to say otherwise and you have to pay a lot more to get back up to that level, this is especially odd considering consoles have held things back a bit.
Click to expand...

This is what I have noticed aswell.

'Ultra' seems to be the new top graphics option now.

I know Rroff can explain it better but afaik Ultra seems to involve mainly 4XAA, dx11 and advanced lightning. I remember discussing this topic few months ago and was surprised to learn that just lightning design in the game can bring the top end gpus to their knees.

I guess it depends on devs as to how much graphics features they want to implement in the game.

3-4 years ago games didn't have as much graphics features compared to now. Plus with the advent of DX11 titles and tesselation, these things are pushing graphics cards quite hard.
 
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WingZero30 said:
This is what I have noticed aswell.

'Ultra' seems to be the new top graphics option now.
Click to expand...

Ultra is the new High. But back in the day there were only Low and High. And then Low, Medium and High. Wasn't it around DX10/11 that an Ultra setting became more widespread? I know for a fact that Company of Heroes added an Ultra for only their DX10 and WoW for its DX11.
 
95thrifles said:
Look at the cost of the 3930/3960s, theyre stupid money, you have to pay a premium to get high end, always have and always will, £200 is a good solid mid range enthusiast card
Click to expand...

I agree.

You have to think that gpus move so fast, so basically its better to buy a £200 gpu that can basically do everything (within reason) and upgrade ever two years, than buy a £300+ card and still upgrade in two years.....

I made that mistake last time and I have learnt from it.
 
High settings these days seem to be pitched at people running the cards just behind the high end 6950, 570, 560Ti, etc. and ultra aimed at multi GPU setups, 570/580 SLI, 6990, etc.

We are still struggling to get decent performance out of even the top end GPUs with more complicated lighting systems alone as WingZero touched on, things like high definition ambient occlusion, global illumination/radiosity can bring anything to its knees.

I don't think we get as great value for money as we used to but its not massively changed, people were paying well over £300 for 8800GTXs, and you can still get cheaper cards that do great, my GTX470 SLI setup I bought for only a little over £300 and they do great - even one on its own is fine at 1680x1050 w/ 4x AA and high or ultra settings and only really feels the pinch at 1920x w/ ultra which is where the 2nd card is useful.
 
Radiation said:
Perhaps but that's not what a lot of benchmarks seem to say, also is it unreasonable to expect the performance of a 580 for £250?
Click to expand...

i hear a lot about benchmarks :confused:

has any one ever played a benchmark ?

the truth is if i can get something for cheaper that does a dam good job im in.

ive been a gtx295 fan boy for a long time and for good reason.

£130 will get you a top gaming expearence for everything upto bf3.

i get 45 to 65 fps on high with a few tweaks and thats with an e6750 0c to 3.4

backing it up.

benchmarks shmenchmarks tut :o
 
One word, one game .... Crysis

This has been out for several years and can still bring a GPU to it's knees.

The other big change is resoluton, 1080p is pretty much the minimum now so games have more demanding engines which run at higher resolutions.

You can pay £100 for a card and play any game out there, £200 gets you 90% of the eye candy. Top end cards are expensive but then they always have been. A 7800GTX was £300 years back and that was quite a small chip with a simple cooler.

Cards now consume >200W.... that is a massive amount of heat in a very small space, nothing short of a miracle really.

I fired up L4D2 the other day .... >230fps @1080p maxed.... with GTX560SLI

AD
 
Rroff said:
I don't think we get as great value for money as we used to but its not massively changed, people were paying well over £300 for 8800GTXs, and you can still get cheaper cards that do great, my GTX470 SLI setup I bought for only a little over £300 and they do great - even one on its own is fine at 1680x1050 w/ 4x AA and high or ultra settings and only really feels the pinch at 1920x w/ ultra which is where the 2nd card is useful.
Click to expand...
Running a pair of 470's on mainly ultra in bf3, high post aa, no blur as it makes me feel sick. averaging 90fps in bf3, which is more gpu bound than bfbc2, (cpu dependent) they cost £260.00. Tried bf3 with a single card, had to drop to medium on most things to maintain a decent framerate, it is a game where sli performs extremely well.
 
I'd say not as much as we used to. I think maybe the 8800gtx was when this first started (was £500 on launch or something). I remember back in 2004/5 when the 6800 was around £300.

However it could also be due to having to ramp up graphics card power a lot with the screen resolutions increasing. The jumps in resolution at the start are only maybe 17-30% more pixels but as the resolutions have increased it adds 60-77% more pixels (was calculating jumps 1440x900 -> 1680x1050 -> 1920x1200 -> 2560x1600)

But mostly it does feel like just charging the premium because a lot of people will pay that price.
 
also take into account pound to the dollar, vat has gone up to 20% and fuel prices mean shipping has gone up, all this adds to anyting we buy
 
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