Enthusiast graphics cards - the new way to show you have too much money?

October 31th, 2007

We don't need to go far back, when it was all simple.
You had high end card(s), you had midrange card(s) and then you had lowend card(s).
All simple, clear differences in prices and performance.
Then someone came up with an idea, hey, how about an new "performance" group?

Both ATI (now AMD) and nVidia introduced great cards for low prices last generation, and now it's happening all over again, and this time it's even more pronounced than before.
True, that 8800GT is coming nearly a year later than the original 8800-series, but stil, it's priced to 200-250€ or so, and offers near 8800GTX performance in most cases - extremely small performance difference, extremely large price difference.

Same for AMD's camp - even more pronounced to be exact - HD38xx series which, by the looks of it, will actually outperform the long awaited, and to many, dissappointing HD2900XT, and even though 2900XT wasn't topend card in the sense of GTX, not for performance nor price, it was still a lot more expensive than the HD38xx series is expected to be.

Many people say "skip the first generation" of new tech since it won't be good performing part / will have bugs etc on the new stuff - but it looks more like "skip the first generation" is true for the price, wait 6 months to a year or even shorter time, and you get cheaply priced, extremely well performing part.

The subject of this post is a bit misleading, after all, buying that enthusiast part gave you great performance a lot sooner than you could get it for the cheaper prices, but there will still be people going to buy GTX's and Ultras at least, when they could have pretty much the same performance for half or even less of the price.