Blog FeedMid-range Cop-out
Not too long ago, Nvidia released their GeForce 8800 series of graphics cards, and ushered in a new level of pixel pushing performance. As has become the norm, the flagship 8800 GTX offered performance almost double that of it’s predecessor. Just the other week, ATI released their latest high-end Radeon and it too shows impressive performance well ahead of anything they have previously released. Now, I have never been one to spend copious amounts of money on any single piece of computer hardware, so to be honest I am not usually too interested in the exact performance of these pricey monstrosities.
When shopping for a graphics card to get my game on, I take one of two routes. Typically, I will get a high-end model from the previous generation. I bought a GeForce 2 Ti when the GeForce 3 came out, and a GeForce 6800 when the 7800 was released. The second route is to just get a mid-range card from the current generation, such as when I got my Radeon 9600. In each case, the cards were easily capable of handling every game out at the time on reasonably high detail levels, with a bit of longevity assured. So the key issue for me is to see which of those routes to take, and usually it’s not too hard an option. However, after viewing the recently released benchmarks of the latest mid-range cards from Nvidia and ATI, it’s become a lot less simple. That’s because neither company has been bothered to release anything worthwhile.
When Nvidia and ATI released their mid-range products over the past 3 or 4 generations, they effectively established what is now the expected norm in video card performance. The latest flagship card would double the performance of it’s predecessor, and the latest mid-range card would be able to approximately equal that same preceding flagship. Essentially, today’s mid-range is yesterdays high-end. It has been like this for quite some time, although there are sometimes complications - such as the introduction of a new DirectX specification. The Radeon I bought was clearly better than the high-end GeForce 4s - not in raw speed, but in critical DX9 support. Luckily this issue only crops up every few generations of cards, but we’re at that point once again with DX10.
So it was with bitter disappointment that the release of the latest mid-range GeForce 8 series cards revealed that they were hardly any better than their GeForce 7 counterparts, and were nowhere near able to match the high-end 7 series cards in… virtually anything. While one may assume that this could be the perfect opportunity for ATI to claw back like it did back with it’s 9×00 series, today this turned out not to be the case. The new mid-range Radeons are equally lacking. Yes yes - the new cards are of course DX10 compatible, but if they’re not even capable of running DX9 games at respectable frame rates, I don’t think that any newer games, DX10 or not, are going to fare any better.
So, what is going on? Has the move to DX10 compatibility and these unified architectures been so jarring for both companies that they’re just unable to even compete with their own older products? Certainly not at reasonable price points. And the expensive cards, while great performers, are only managing to achieve that by being ridiculously oversized and cumbersome. The chip inside the 8800 is physically gigantic (scroll half way down), and despite it’s size they still needed a secondary display chip because they just couldn’t fit it all on the one die. And what on earth happened to single-slot coolers?
It seems to me that with gaming technology progressing at its current rate, plus the move to higher resolutions and widescreen aspect ratios, Nvidia and ATI are finding it hard to keep up. While they are capable of providing hardware to run all this new fangled stuff, it’s only available at high price points with terribly bulky dimensions, with a lot of heat and power usage. Under that, it seems that either they just haven’t been able to make anything that is cost-effective and reasonable, or they don’t particularly want to. It seems terribly suspicious that both companies released underwhelming mid-range cards in the same generation. High-end parts make very few sales (proportionally), but the margins are much greater. Perhaps the lacklustre performance here is to force me to buy a high-end part? I know I am definitely not the first person to suggest something sinister is going on between these two. For the price if a GeForce 8800 Ultra I can buy two Xbox 360’s for crying out loud.
Given the options, they have either become incompetent or are getting quite sly indeed. The current set of mid-range cards is a complete performance cop-out, and right now the only reasonable options appear to be either getting a pricey beast, or sacrificing future efficiency by getting a previous generation card. I can’t remember the last time this industry was looking so poor.
29th June | Reply
I felt this so acutely when i was arranging my purchase of a new PC recently and this came to bite me on the arse. I’ve always bought midrange cards but the tests on the Geforce 8500 and 8600 were so unimpressive that it just didn’t make sense to continue the tradition. I therefore bought a Ati 1950 because it was priced comparably to an 8600 but the performance in current games was so much better that I’d rather use it for DX9 path games and get good performance than get an low end 8x series card and get poor performance in both.
29th June | Reply
I’ve been of the opinion for many years that the world would be a better place if the US military could arrange for a couple of stray missiles to hit both ATI and nVidia. This apparent never ending cycle of madness needs to end sometime soon. Every year (or less) both companies seem to release yet another new range of cards at bonkers prices and bigger dimensions that the last generation.
In this respect I’m happy to have moved to laptops. Yeah, they’re not as powerful as desktop machines by a long shot but at least we don’t have to put up with this annual nonsense. Newer generations of GPUs come to laptops in relatively modest chip-form and you don’t need to fill your machine with a ton of cooling apparatus just to stop the thing melting its way through the floor.
29th June | Reply
The offside to that though is the prices on Laptops have really stayed pretty high. I managed to find me a vendor that would sell me a gaming desktop for 750 dollars which is pretty cheap but a decent game laptop price never seems to get any substantially lower. Even years after i saw the first one anything that’ll really sing even on just today’s games not considering future-proofing a baseline for a laptop is about 1400. I like the constant changing selection as older stuff becomes overstock and constant sales you just don’t see as much on laptops.
29th June | Reply
When the MacBook Pro’s first came out I was pretty impressed at the Radeon X1600’s inside them. They were underclocked, but that could be overridden (for example, by running Windows when playing games). The other week I was even more impressed to see that the latest MacBook Pros released (with LED screens) also had newer video cards - GeForce 8600M’s. I was expecting a pretty big performance increase, but upon seeing the benchmarks, there was barely one to speak of. Pretty lame.
Makes me wonder why they even bothered.
29th June | Reply
In Reply to #4:
The duff benchmarks came as a bit of a shock so I’m still quite happy with my purchase despite it struggling last night with Quake 4. I suspect that the lack of performance may well be a driver issue that will be sorted out, however.
4th July | Reply
Well, I have to say I am now somewhat surprised with just how cheap ATI has gone with these products. I saw the MSRP on the review sites listing them as a fair bit cheaper than the mid-range GeForces… but now they are starting to be listed on retailer sites down here, the price difference is actually staggering.
A Radeon 2600XT from PowerColor is listed for $167 AU. That is less than half the price of a GeForce 8600GTS - it’s actually the same as the 8500, which sucks terribly.
So, now ATI has a massive price and performance gap - one high-end card at AU $550, and their second fastest card at $167. Hopefully they’ll fill out the family some more soon - and hopefully Nvidia will respond to those awfully low prices soon as well.
20th July | Reply
I just got me an 8600GT. I only been using it since yesterday, so don’t expect any experience reports. I haven’t yet got round to any gaming.
Now, while I agree with many points argued above, I do feel that, for me specifically, it was a good purchase.
First of all, before this I was stuck with a Ti4200. While that card lasted a lot longer than I expected (main example: HL2 ran good enough to be fun), it really was incapable of runnning anything new. Now, while I haven’t been gaming all that much these last two years, I’ve recently started playing more games again and, with a Hitman and Splinter Cell game out there and Bioshock coming, it really needed to be replaced.
Of course a simple replacement wouldn’t be enough due to me still having an Athlon XP 2400+ and just an AGP slot on my motherboard, so I also got a new motherboard, a Core Duo 4400 and 2GB DDR2 RAM, severely limiting my financial options in the graphics department.
Now, why the 8600GT? Well, first off, it was decently priced (got it for €96) and passively cooled, which is, for me at least, a definite advantage. While it might not be super fast even in DX9 games, I’ll still be playing in 1024×768 due to monitor limitations (a speed upgrade had the priority and besides, my dual monitor setup provides more than enough desktop space for most other uses), so the card will most likely perform quite nicely for quite a while.
So why not a X1950? Simple: DirectX 10. Or, in other words, longetivity. When DirectX 9 was introduced, there were a lot of “ooohs” and “aaahs”, but at the same time everybody knew that any DirectX 8 card with hardware shaders would still be capable of running DirectX 9 games for quite another while. The DirectX 10 architecture on the other hand, is a lot less backwards compatible. DirectX 9 was mostly the addition of neat graphical effects which generally did not affect gameplay. DirectX 10 isn’t just some neat graphical effects, it actually removes some of the tight limitations in the number of different objects on screen present in previous DirectX versions. Thus, in order to be backwards compatible, a DirectX 10 game needs either not to many different objects (saves work creating them, so easy enough for developers, but the game won’t be the prettiest one around), or the developer needs to create an alternate object set for DirectX 9 (in other words: more work, thus higher development costs and even then not neccessarily possible due to gameplay limitations).
My Ti4200 was slow, but it did have hardware shaders, essentially making sure that the speed would become a problem before compatibility would. I actually managed to get Company of Heroes running on it (after setting all the control panel options all the way to ‘Performance’ instead of ‘Quality’ and even overclocking the card a bit, and even then it was really only good enough for single player), so speed indeed became a problem before compatibility.
At the moment, the first DX10-only games are already on the horizon. I don’t care about a low resolution, since I’m limited to 1024×768 anyway, so the frame rates will probably still be good enough for me. And even though I might not always be able to play them with the graphics at the highest setting, I’ll at least still be able to play them. For me, that’s what matters.
20th July | Reply
Well the major problem I have with these new cards is that they offer no substantial performance benefits over the last generation. Given that you’re quite a few generations behind with your GeForce 4, that becomes a moot point for you.
The thing is though, as DX10 vs DX9 performance comparisons have shown, the only cards cards capable of keeping high framerates while actually making use of the benefits that DX10 offers over DX9 are the high-end cards.
I am very, very certain that you would have found the X1950 Pro to be the better purchase, for the exact same reasons Vermouth got one over an 8600. An X1950 Pro can play games at high framerates in DX9 mode with the graphics turned on quite high. The 8600s and 2600s from Nvidia and ATI play on that same DX9 mode with much lower framerates, and come DX10, the details will have to be turned down so low to get playable frames that you might as well be in DX9 mode anyway. All those extra objects that DX10 allows you to render on screen? The 8600 most likely can’t handle them.
The DX9 video card market is so huge because DX9 had such a long lifetime, that I am quite sure that game developers will be supporting it for quite some time yet - the fact that only Vista can run DX10 means they’d be shafting far too many gamers if they did otherwise. I’m not worried about a lack of DX9 support at all.
20th July | Reply
I don’t think the 8600GT will perform as bad as some people like to pretend. Sure, the X1950Pro is faster, but I think that, especially with my 1024×768 resolution in mind, it will perform good enough. And if it doesn’t? Well, then I’ll just have to wait till I get more money and buy a better card, or go SLI (all GeForce 8-series cards are SLI-ready out of the box, and by then the second-hand market will probably be full of 8600GTs).
And no matter what you say, the X1950 is still about €30 more expensive, which is quite a noticable difference when compared with a €96 8600GT (almost 30%). Do I also get a 30% performance increase for that money? No. At least not according to the benchmarks I’ve seen (don’t worry, I did look at plenty of benchmarks before buying - I’m not completely stupid
).
Either way, even if I end up upgrading again sooner than expected, at least then I’ll know that at the time I got it, the 8600GT was quite capable of running any of the released games (and I do have some catching up to do) and was the cheaper option.
23rd August | Reply
Hello
I recently bought xfx 8600GT graphics card. I am quite happy with the performance. but there is one thing which is annoying me. I am not able to push the video resolution in all the games beyond 1280 *1024. I don’t know why such thing is happening. My hardware config is
P4 3.0 Ghz with HT technology
1GB DDR2 (800Mhz)
intel motherboard 965RY
one of my friend has similar hardware configuration with 7300 GT(lower end compared to mine). He is able to use video resolution beyond 1280 * 1024. Can someone help me in this?
23rd August | Reply
Do you have a 17 or 19″ LCD? If so, it’s likely that the maximum resolution of the screen itself is 1280×1024, and you can’t go higher than that.
23rd August | Reply
In Reply to #11:
i have 19″ LCD with resolution 1440*900. Is it dependent on monitor resolution?
23rd August | Reply
In Reply to #12:
The maximum resolution of the monitor will dictate the maximum resolution of anything displayed on it. You can’t, for example, play a game at 1024*768 if your monitor only supports a maximum resolution of 800*600. However, in your case it does sound as though you should be able to go further than 1280*1024. Do you see options to go above this resolution for your OS resolution (I’m assuming Windows is your OS here)? If not then perhaps you need to install a driver for your monitor. If you do see options for higher resolutions, what happens when you attempt to select those resolutions?
23rd August | Reply
In Reply to #13:
I’m using windows XP. I don’t see the OS resolution beyond 1440*900. This is the max it shows.
23rd August | Reply
Yes, and that’s normal.
As for games, some may not support 1440×900 because it’s not a commonly used resolution. And you can’t see resolutions higher than that (such as 1600×1200) because your monitor doesn’t support those.
23rd August | Reply
In Reply to #15:
My friend who has similar hardware config(with 17″ LCD, 1440*900) but has 7300 GT graphics card. He said that he was able to see in the game setup, the video resolution as 1600*1200. How this is possible. I don’t understand such behaviour. Does it mean that I can never enjoy playing games at higher resolution?
23rd August | Reply
You can never play games or do anything over 1440×900 with your current screen. As for why you can’t even see that in games, but your friend can, I am not sure. I am also not sure why he can even see 1600×1200 as an option as his screen certainly can’t display it if it’s an LCD.
I really don’t know why he can see resolutions which you can’t though, given your respective video cards. My only guess is that there may be driver issues involved, or your friend is crazy.