Anyone else think that Video Card Prices are out of Control!?!

revenant said:
yep that is a good deal.. in their time 1mb simms were usually around $35 each.. or so...

as a lot of others have said I think the prices are on par from the past.. maybe even a little better? the hardware of today does a lot more for your $ that is for sure.. I paid 699 for my 8800GTX at launch... definitely the most I spent on a single video card but never regretted the purchase at all.. I used the crap out of it for over two years!
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Best buy has a brand new Laptop for $349 :eek: I remember when a cheap laptop was $2500 (or more).

I think people are just getting used to the "commodity" hardware and are not accustomed to "enthusiast" hardware. Not that I would ever spend $1000 on a video card. But it does seem in line with past enthusiast prices.
 
Yeah they are built cheap too. My T60 with IPS screen and 16x12 is still going strong, I'm typing now on it's wonderful keys. Today laptops are disposable junk with cheap KB. ..

I'm looking forward to the next 4200ti Dan, I think 7850 may come close. There are guys already getting 50% Oc's on air - when price drops less than $200 it will be a great value. But it will never reach, top card levels, like GTX 680 levels so it probably keeps it out of contention.
 
I don't understand these threads at all.

If you think the GTX680 is over priced at $500, then you simply like having $500 more than you like having a GTX680.

You think that you can get more enjoyment or pleasure (aka "value") by spending $500 on something else.

Now fortunately, the market does not give you a simple binary choice like I would - so you can decide that buying a GTX480 for $200 and having $300 in your pocket is much more enjoyable than just having $500 or just having a GTX680.

Now if you want to have both a GTX680 *AND* $500 in your pocket, the market also has a solution for you:

Become more valuable to the economy and make more money.


Because there are employers who are thinking "I can't really get that much productivity out of these employees - not like we used to back in the old days and not compared to how much we have to pay them"

And you know what? It's the exact same thing.
 
All we are asking for is near (-1) top performances for $200-$300 like we are used to and they are not giving it to us with 28nm. I don't see what's so hard to understand.

Last year you could get a $260 GTX 570 and make a $500 GTX 580 easy.

Alternatively you could get a $220 6950 and make one after flash and Ocing.

The cards to make GTX 680 levels are above $400. ($415 GTX 670 and $460 7970)

Best bet is $380 7950 but that's still $100 overpriced.
 
ZoNe said:
All we are asking for is near (-1) top performances for $200-$300 like we are used to and they are not giving it to us with 28nm. I don't see what's so hard to understand.

Last year you could get a $260 GTX 570 and make a $500 GTX 580 easy.

Alternatively you could get a $220 6950 and make one after flash and Ocing.

The cards to make GTX 680 levels are above $400. ($415 GTX 670 and $460 7970)

Best bet is $380 7950 but that's still $100 overpriced.
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Other than your sense of entitlement what reason does AMD or Nvidia have to do what you just outlined? They are for profit companies who are able to sell their current stock at current prices, why in the world should they do what you want.

It boggles my mind how little people understand about economics.
 
demingo said:
Other than your sense of entitlement what reason does AMD or Nvidia have to do what you just outlined? They are for profit companies who are able to sell their current stock at current prices, why in the world should they do what you want.

It boggles my mind how little people understand about economics.
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Entitlement works both ways. They are not entitled to a dollar of my hard earned money and I assume others money by the plethora of these 'high cost 28nm threads' until they give us value.
 
ZoNe said:
Entitlement works both ways. They are not entitled to a dollar of my hard earned money and I assume others money by the plethora of these 'high cost 28nm threads' until they give us value.
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Wow you dance around the point completely. Of course they are not entitled, however, looking at current stock levels, it is apparent that enough people think the pricing is fine. So again, why should they honor your "request" if the current pricing scheme is working for them?
 
demingo said:
Wow you dance around the point completely. Of course they are not entitled, however, looking at current stock levels, it is apparent that enough people think the pricing is fine. So again, why should they honor your "request" if the current pricing scheme is working for them?
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Only 680s are OOS. Who knows how many they are making 100 a day 10? Every other 28nm has plentiful stocks, What funny is I don't even see anyone owning 7870s, a fantastic new card with miser power features but obviously priced too high by reviewers words and lack of reviews and full stock at newegg so it may not be working. My 'request' is just price/performance which the vast majority of people must consider to make an informed decision. Not many will pay 100% more money for 30% gains like we are seeing w/ 28nm. Save the 680. that card is priced about right hence oos.
 
ZoNe said:
Only 680s are OOS. Who knows how many they are making 100 a day 10? Every other 28nm has plentiful stocks, What funny is I don't even see anyone owning 7870s, a fantastic new card with miser power features but obviously priced too high by reviewers words and lack of reviews and full stock at newegg so it may not be working. My 'request' is just price/performance which the vast majority of people must consider to make an informed decision. Not many will pay 100% more money for 30% gains like we are seeing w/ 28nm. Save the 680. that card is priced about right hence oos.
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Being OOS is not the criteria for whether a product is priced correctly. In fact, if the product is OOS it probably means that its <gasp> underpriced. For all the rest of the products you're claiming are too high priced, sure - they could probably move "more" quantity if they dropped the price, but would likely not be more profitable.

Simply because you don't value it as high does not mean the market doesn't. If you're only willing to spend X amount on Y component, then so be it - pick the best you can find in that price range and enjoy. This is how the market works, not by a single consumer stating that he wants Y at X amount and all manufacturers having to adjust to it. If, on the other hand, instead of a select few stating what the prices "should" be, you had the mass market actually ACT with their purchasing decisions, then you would see the market shift - hence, an effective display of demand. However, that's NOT what is happening, and for the time being the market is supporting their pricing scheme.

Once again folks, remember that a) these companies are not non-profits, and b) the market demand dictates pricing, not your personal ideals. If you were selling thingy-widget-mabobs and the market for said thingy-widget-mabobs supported pricing them at $10,000 a pop (i.e. you could happily sell them at that price and make more profit at that quanity sold/price than other pricing models), what would you say to the guy that walked up to you and told you you should sell them for $100? Would you say "You're right, I should make significantly less than my potential," or, "While I appreciate your opinion, I have Persons A-Z lining up to buy at my price, so I think that's fair." Now tack on the fact that these are corporations responsible to shareholders (in other words, decisions should be made to enhance profitability), and your position makes even less sense.
 
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ZoNe said:
I'm not going to even start on what a superior display trimitron/diamondtron was - show me a NIB Sony GDM-FW900 and I'll buy it right now.:p But I see your point that top parts always cost top dollars. Maybe we were just lucky w/ last few gens price wars on video cards where you could get some real screamers less than $300. Not GTX 580s but close with a little tweaking.
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Um, here you go:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1688429&highlight=Sony+FW900

Though, I'd take an IPS panel over a CRT.
 
I think videocards have been cheaper ever ... the mid range stuff is really inexpensive and will run any game with tons of eye candy
 
I don't think that things are out of control at all. There are still options from $20 to $1,000. The only thing that is missing is Nvidia's mid and low rage 600 series cards. Admittedly, prices are higher than I would like to see for the high end stuff, but AMD has already dropped their prices there. Once they drop the 78xx cards a bit, things should be right where they should be. When I say that there are options from 20 to 1,000, I don't necessarily mean the latest generation of cards. There are some great deals out there right now on gtx 560s, 6870s, and even 6950s.
 
Monkey God said:
Not out of control. Supply and demand. People keep thinking they need $1000 of video cards and 3 monitors to enjoy themselves.
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Because the masses have these setups... :rolleyes: Multidisplay gaming is a small percent of the enthusiast market. NVidia and AMD charge large sums because of supply and demand...you're right. But your reasoning is wrong. The PC industry is getting console and tabletized. There is a low demand for high end graphics cards when most consumers buy/use laptops and business's buy/use desktops with integrated graphics. Thus, the two major graphics card brands make a profit by selling small quantites at high prices.
 
moutwtrng said:
I maybe wrong but, I really feel that Video Card prices are way out of control...

You would think that as technology advances that it would get more cost efficient and make it more affordable for the masses to acquire?

I mean if you look at the price progression from the gtx 300's to the 600's or the Amd 4800's to the 7800's its just crazy?! And not to mention the economy we are in right now...

The GTX 690 was just announced and I am loving the card but for $999, the excitement just went out the door!

Anyone else feel the same way?
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Please read up on the following topics:
-Supply and Demand
-"Perceived Value" and how it can alter prices set by other factors
-Inflation

After that, look up the launch prices for every top tier video card from the last 12 years. You will notice all of them are $500+ except for a few outliers. All things considered, I would say the fact we can still purchase top tier cards for $500 or less, still get amazing performance, and continue to get performance increases is a god damn miracle.

Considering the GTX680 launched at $500, a product that is essentially 2 of them put together could command a price of $999. The price seems a little inflated because there are some things that would seem to lower the price a little due to less cost of material due to shared pieces (such as pcb). However, no one except Nvidia could tell you exactly how much the bill of materials is, and unless you find that out the price will be altered by perceived value.
 
Pricey yes, but out of control.
I dont know, its such a complicated area of technology.
Fabrication is expensive and designing a GPU is expensive, testing is expensive, working with Game Devs is expensive.
Honestly the price has pretty much stayed in a central area. 500-600 gets you the best sGPU just like it did back in the days of the X800/X800XTPE/6800U days. Whats changed is the mGPU landscape has evolved and thrived created a 1000 dollar segment. They know people are willing to drop that much on two cards so now we have dual GPU single PCB cards that are already in that range. It seems normal to me.
 
At the core of the subject you are looking at the wrong cards to say "too expensive".
Your argument is like looking at a Porsche and saying that cars in general are too expensive.
 
Price of this gen are actually lower than they have ever been on the top end. I do however think that AMD has really overpriced the 7870. It is almost pointless to get it since you can get 7950 for less than 400. I never understood why they didn't drop that card in price to like 299 with the recent price drop.

Oh by the way someone talking about the 670 ti, it is never coming out because the gtx 670 only has one module disabled and there is no room to fit another card between 680 and 670. The 680 was suppose to 670 ti from what I have read.
 
There is no reason to upgrade unless you like buring a hole in your wallet which is a good feeling but it goes away.
 
Product pricing is affected by volume, yields and market competition.It would take till Q3 2012 for 28nm capacity to really improve in a big way. Also the fact that Nvidia has released products based on only GK104 for the desktop market hasn't helped things while AMD has launched their entire desktop product stack based on 3 different chips. When Nvidia launches more cards like GTX 670 and fills their product stack we can expect competitive pricing.
As far as this generation being overpriced if we can recall the prices on HD 5870 at launch were USD 379 but quickly shot up close to USD 450. It stayed there till GTX 480 launched. If I had to pick the better value the HD 7970 now at USD 449 - 479 is better value than the HD 5870 at a similar time frame (4 months from launch). The most demanding games are literally running at twice the speed of HD 5870 on a HD 7970 at 1.125 Ghz. (BF3, Crysis 2, Metro 2033)

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-7970-overclock-guide/12

People having a GTX 580 should wait for a GTX 780 to get a 2x performance jump :D
 
raghu78 said:
People having a GTX 580 should wait for a GTX 780 to get a 2x performance jump :D
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I'm a "generation skipper" myself. I always skip a couple of generations. That's my "performance boost feeling" philosophy. And in my past experience two generations were never enough for a 100% boost.

Now I have GTX 460. Immediately before that I had 9600GT. It was a "giant leap forward" (forgive the commie Chinese term usage) indeed, skipping a whole bunch of generations. But did I get the 100% boost? Nope. In some games I got around 30% increase, in others around 50%, but nothing near 100%.

Now, do I get a 2x performance jump if I upgrade to a hypothetical GTX 660? It's exactly a two generation leap.

Something tells me I don't. And the same something tells even 680 won't get me there. 30%, 40%, 50% -- maybe. But 100% performance increase? Hardly.

It is an awkward moment when the whole 2 generations of hardware can't get you an adequate performance improvement.
 
Just wanted to add: I've always been an average "X6XX guy" (X6X in modern naming convention), so my experience is somewhat limited (in addition to being limited to NVIDIA). But, again, something tells me it's pretty much the same situation in X7X and X8X areas.

Is now a good time to snap out the X6X zone and switch to X7X or even X8X? The same something tells me it would be a "giant leap into stupidity". :D But who knows, who knows...
 
DoubleTap said:
If you think the GTX680 is over priced at $500, then you simply like having $500 more than you like having a GTX680.
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I agree, those who complain about $500 for a GTX 680 should be killed. Preferably through decapitation (they don't use their heads much, anyway). :D

But it's a real "pricing vandalism" going on in Europe. GTX 680 costs over $700 here, something like 8800 GTX cost back in 2006.
 
Nope I don't think so. There is something for everyone at the moment. No matter how much you want to spend.
 
Goodcoin said:
I'm a "generation skipper" myself. I always skip a couple of generations. That's my "performance boost feeling" philosophy. And in my past experience two generations were never enough for a 100% boost.

Now I have GTX 460. Immediately before that I had 9600GT. It was a "giant leap forward" (forgive the commie Chinese term usage) indeed, skipping a whole bunch of generations. But did I get the 100% boost? Nope. In some games I got around 30% increase, in others around 50%, but nothing near 100%.

Now, do I get a 2x performance jump if I upgrade to a hypothetical GTX 660? It's exactly a two generation leap.

Something tells me I don't. And the same something tells even 680 won't get me there. 30%, 40%, 50% -- maybe. But 100% performance increase? Hardly.

It is an awkward moment when the whole 2 generations of hardware can't get you an adequate performance improvement.
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Nvidia does not have a GK100. Their entire product stack has moved up in pricing. This is possible because Nvidia's DX11 implementation in GTX 480 was more aggressive than AMD's HD 5870. AMD had to make significant investments in DX11 tesselation and compute performance which Nvidia made in Fermi GF100. Whereas Nvidia regressed with compute performance in GK104. Thats why HD 7970 is of a larger die size with superior compute performance and will have better longevity (more bandwidth for demanding games).
Fermi was very aggressive in its DX11 implementation with 4 GPC,4 raster engines, 16 polymorph engines, 48 ROP. GTX 680 has 4 GPC, 4 raster engines, 8 polymorph engines (ver 2.0), 32 ROP. Even with higher core clocks in GTX 680 the resources are not doubled. Thats why you have to wait for GK110 aka GTX 780 to realize the true successor to Fermi GF100/ GF110.
 
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There is nothing to play on these high end cards. They're just selling you on gimmicky 3d and eyefinity now.

Until then, yes the cards seem overpriced because there's nothing to do with them. Monitors aren't really gaining resolution that fast.
 
Dan_D said:
My first video card wasn't even capable of 3D graphics as we know them today. And I don't recall what some of those cards really cost back then, but I do recall that we had cards that were $300-$400 during the Voodoo 1 & 2 days.
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Voodoo2 8 meg was ~200, Voodoo 2 12 was ~300, when both were out. Of course the 8MB one was closer to 3 at debut.

The 11 Quantum 3DX24s I bought in Dec. '98 were $600 retail, per. Note: these had a dual V2s, but they were on their own internal memory interconnect, that ran at 3.5GB/S transfer. They also were the ONLY Voodoo2-based card to do DirectX as well as OGL. Later, the DX driver became "curiosly" unavailable. Probably due to 3DFX licensing issues.

The Geforce2 - GTS was nowhere near $400. In the 7950/8800 series days, single card, dual GPU solutions were approaching $900, but these were low-volume, specialty cards, and I believe the 79xx one was Nvidia's first dual-GPU product. Note also that Nvidia had no real competition at all until ATI made a real move into non-oem stuff. I may be off on this, but I believe it was in like '04-ish. If I remember right Nvidia never quite hit $1k prices, even when there was no real challenger.

The prices are not in line anymore. The last 3 years (2 generations) seem to be abnormally priced for the non-specialty low volume cards.

Just my opinion.

600 bucks bought complete and total dominance in 98. Dominace that lasted until the Geforce (GTS?? GTX??) came out. At least in OGL.

the TNT2 Ultra 32MB cards we bought ended up being used for 2d or DX only. And they were ~$200....

$600 keeps you on top for about..... well it doesn't... now.
 
Note on above:

We bought the diamond as the test GF2.... $299. Others were 350. We ended up going with the 64MB variant.
 
I don't see a real need to pay premium prices for GPUs unless you game at extremely high resolutions, want to be bleeding edge or need a lot of horsepower for 120Hz monitors/3D.

I paid $329 for a 4850x2 ~3.5 years ago and it still maxes out just about everything in my library. For that price (or $400 since I put aftermarket fans on it) I can get a screaming fast GPU with 3Gb memory and blow away just about any game available, and enjoy hi-res texture packs in games like Skyrim.

Dan_D said:
We also pay less for displays than we used to. In 1999 I think I paid $450 or something for a 19" Sony Trinitron display.
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I remember calling a Dell 2405FPW at $900 a bargain. Now I'm happy with the U2412 for $300, and it drops below $300 from time to time (if it's not already cheaper.)

Cheap LCDs probably drive a lot of high end GPU sales with multimonitor setups.
 
Meh... I only upgrade when performance becomes unusable...

Skip generations all the time, I find the performance increments too small. Went from 9600gt to 2x 9600gt in sli, to 5870 to 5870+5830cf.

Price is relative, I like sweet spot prices, but will get top end parts if price gauging in under control...
 
InternationalHat said:
There is nothing to play on these high end cards. They're just selling you on gimmicky 3d and eyefinity now.

Until then, yes the cards seem overpriced because there's nothing to do with them. Monitors aren't really gaining resolution that fast.
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I agree completely, there just isn't a market for really high end games. Not a lot of people purchase $1500+ gaming rigs, or at least not enough to justify a $50 million development budget aimed at that audience. Plus, this particular group are super fussy, and hard to please...

I think it's getting harder and harder to eek out more performance from these chips. It's all pretty mature tech at this point, and they need to rely more on manufacturing improvements now than architecture improvements, which is expensive. Also consider how much nicer the cards themselves look now, that's worth something right? I mean just look at those GTX690 screenshots again.

Although I would think the Radeon 78xx's and 77xx's should eventually be quite a bit cheaper than they are now, once the 28nm process matures.
 
7 months ago I paid 260 bucks for a gtx570 and it came with Batman AC. please tell me what 28nm gpu can I upgrade to for the same amount of money. all I see is a 7850 for that price which is slower than my old card. sure the 7850 can oc quite a bit but why would I get a card I have to oc just to beat the stock last gen card I have now?
 
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