OT: Worst PC Decision

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
I recommend that you do NOT go with the best card on the market... unless you have a huge amount of money to waste... in which case it would be better that you send the excess my way. You can get a card that costs 1/2 to 1/3 as much, and still does everything necessary to run today's high end games as well as tomorrow's. You do not need to spend an arm and a leg to buy hardware that will cost half as much in a month... the differences between the high end and medium end graphics cards are rather negligible at this point in time...

I was of this school of thought too but now I must stand my ground. For best performance and the best intergrated top of the line support buy the top of the line card. The cheepies lack a lot of the estials that there big brothers have. I made this mistake twice and I'm telling you if you want the best performance and most compatability with newer games and their features, pay the price.

[Roanon]

I still disagree.
Of course, cheapest buy is not a good buy. But most of the features of high-end cards are not even used by a single piece of software at the time when you buy them. The best card is the one just below the high level, where reasonable prices rule. Paying double or triple the price for a few gimmicks more does not give you value for money. By the time you really need all these cool features of the high-end card, it will cost half or less - and they you can still buy it with the money you saved when buying a cheaper card firsthand. And still have money left over.

I just bought a GeForce FX5900 for less than 200€. I bet it will be good for at least 1 year, when I can buy a better card than what currently costs 500€ for around 200€ again, keeping me going for another year. Paying 500€ now would maybe give me one and a half year till I need to change, do that 2 times and you pay 1000€ for roughly the same performance over 3 years than with my schedule buying 3 cards for a total of 600€.

Yes, you need to update more often if you do not buy high end. Still it is cheaper. The prices for high end cards are just too ridiculous, there is absolutely no value for money. Do tell me for which game you absolutely need a card for more than 400$ - and please no games "scheduled to be released next month" that will beta around next year.

[Fyron]

What Roanon said.

[ May 18, 2004, 23:39: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Atrocities]

Hey look I agree about the cost thing 100%, but I am telling you that card manufactures are including needed and now supported features on the lower cost cards. Take for example Far Cry, by all rights my GeForce FX 57 Ultra should run this game on hits higest settings with no problem, but the best I can do is Medium. Remember this card is less than six months old and I had to buy it to run the then State of the Art Deus Ex II. Bit shading, bump shading, something dot resolution at FPS, god only knows what the hell the differance is now, but the point is if I had opted for the Radeon 9800 or the better GeForce FX card I would be playing Far Cry on its highest settings.

Really all I am saying is that more and more games are using the features you find on the high cost high end cards that don't exsist on the less expensive Versions.

If all you want to do is play NOTOR, a borning game of epic proportions, then by all means just buy the X-Box or whatever card the game requires.

And for the record, NoToR is one uber magnum boring game on a galatic grand scale.

[Fyron]

Yes, but you can still play Far Cry just fine, right? So that just goes to prove the point... you do not need the bells and whistles provided by the cards that cost 2x to 3x as much money...

[Roanon]

Of course, if you think you have to play every new game on highest settings (even if that rarely makes much difference) you NEED the most expensive card. These customers are what the manufacturers like most, and they know they can rely on them paying ANY price - because they just MUST have all the latest gimmicks, like superultraspeed with separate shadow textures for invisible pixels moving behind objects covering them, and so on.

But your average highest-tech card won't Last much longer than half a year - if you keep that standards. Nothing to say against of course, if you have enough money - its your money . Ok, you can always resell our old card on ebay when upgrading - but, while the average middlehigh card will drop from around 200$ to around 150$, half a year old high tech cards usually plummet from 500$ to 200$...

[Wardad]