CONSPIRACY...please discuss your agrrements or grievances

CONSPIRACY...please discuss your agreements or grievances

Yeah, I know I'm not the first and definately won't be the last to say this, but there is pretty obviously a deal between software and hardware manufacturers to keep digging into our pockets. I'm bringing this to light because I'm rather peeved-off about the horrible 1fps that my vidcard I got a couple of months ago is getting in 3dmark2k5. Yes, the demos look nicer than 2k1,2k2,2k3 and 2k4 did but I really find it hard to believe that the level of effects and details in 2k5 vs the other versions warrants 1fps. These graphics are still animated, not cinematic quality and the sfx used while impressive are not on par with anything done by LucasFilm or DreamWorks or the like. I can buy the idea that we need more powerful processors to crunch or music and video files because that technology was in it's infancy prior to the p4/k7 gen procs, but this video card stuff is ridiculous. It's like buying a new console system every 2-4 years, and I know how you PC gamers hate consoles, except that you're just getting a gfx card and not a whole system. That brings me to this point: the price of the vidcards are way too high. I want to see the profit margin on these things!!!! The next gen consoles are going to be $499 for the Discover, PS3 and X-box2, but the Nintendo will be $249. Yeah, my card runs Doom3 fine, will probably do HL2 and Halo2 fine as well, but with the flurry of new cards being released, you have to believe that the mfgs are holding back so that they can release something new 6 months later to rip us off or are rushing stuff to market. Either way, the new labels on boxes for games saying RUNS BEST WITH ATI or PLAYS FASTER ON NVIDIA are just proof that these guys are partners in crime with the game mfgs and they're telling their programmers to intentionally write their code sloppy and require more and more powerful GPUs, RAM etc.......

Yo, my new 9700 pro does 0fps in one 3dmark05 test. I agree that new things that are supposed to look better don't warrant such a low performance. Just be lucky that you can turn down the quality on games.

and they're telling their programmers to intentionally write their code sloppy and require more and more powerful GPUs, RAM etc.......

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Agreed, it's a joke. Take something like Farcry - it looks awesome and runs smoothly at high settings. Same goes for Neverwinter Nights. But then take Halo - I have to turn it down to 1024x768, 2x/4x, and disable a bunch of effects for it to even be playable. It's terrible.

Are you guys even thinking about what you're looking at?

I'm rather peeved-off about the horrible 1fps that my vidcard I got a couple of months ago is getting in 3dmark2k5.

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You do realize those two particular tests are software rendering everything in order to stress your CPU right? Notice how it does one pass at normal speed, and then later another pass at ~1fps?

But then take Halo - I have to turn it down to 1024x768, 2x/4x, and disable a bunch of effects for it to even be playable

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Halo was one of the very first PC-based games that extensively used shaders. With new hardware comes new learnings for the software developers -- you can't expect a brand new technology to be flawless in itself, and to be used flawlessly by the folks playing with it.

the price of the vidcards are way too high. I want to see the profit margin on these things!!!!

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How do you think they pay for the research and development to build newer and better devices? Hundreds of people with masters and doctorate degrees in engineering and math and other varying sciences sit in a braintrust of sorts just trying to conceptualize new ideas and then find ways to make them happen.

Also consider what makes up a video card versus what makes up a "computer":

A video card has a processor just like your computer does. Your computer's processor is likely built on a 130nm lithography process and contains something like 80m transistors -- your brand new video card is built on the exact same process and contains 160+ million transistors. You also have to cool that puppy, since that kind of transistor count on such a small process makes a TON of heat. Your processor comes with a heatsink right?

A video card has a memory bus, memory bus controller, and a controller for IO to all the other devices it touches (decoder/encoder, SLI possibilities, etc). It also has a whole power management system for thermal control and voltage regulation. Your computer has a fully seperate chipset as well as voltage regulation equipment for these details, which is part of an entire motherboard layout.

A video card also has it's own entire discrete memory, just like your computer. Except your computer runs it at 200mhz DDR with a 64-bit bus, while your video card is running it at 500+mhz DDR with a 256-bit bus.

So, can you buy a P4 Extreme Edition processor (80+m transistors you know), a 300mhz+ FSB DDR-capable motherboard and 256mb of PC4800+ ram for $500? Yeah, maybe.

Can you buy a video card with more than double the transistors, more than eight times the computational output, more than twice the heat output, more than four times the memory bandwidth, and arguable just as much power dissapation for the same $500. Yeah, and you wonder why it costs so much?

My advice: if you can't pay, don't play.

lol

i wish i had spent the extra 20$ to go to the 9700 pro
my 9500 pro is slow

yeah, what you said is all true Alb, but I still think they're purposefully coding the new stuff to require more mem and more powerful gpus than is neccessary, just to force people to buy stuff quicker. I can afford to pay, just can't justify it. My last vidcard before my fx5600 was a TNT2. Why??? Because I paid for a Jaguar,PS, N64, Saturn, PS2, X-box, DreamCast and GameCube instead. They've (Xbox,PS2,Gamecube) lasted me 5 years until the next great thing came along and wasn't obsolete in 2 months like my supposedly "midrange" 5600 was.

realtadiquantu said:

i wish i had spent the extra 20$ to go to the 9700 pro
my 9500 pro is slow

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You may be able to flash that 9500 to a 9700...search the ATI section for the directions and info.

theMonster said:

are partners in crime with the game mfgs and they're telling their programmers to intentionally write their code sloppy and require more and more powerful GPUs, RAM etc.......

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I know! It is ridiculous. Back in 1997 I had a Gateway with a 333MHz P2, it was not the top of the line model, and it played the most recent games for a long time. My new rig, as you can see in my sig, was a bit cheaper than the Gateway was, but it is ridiculous, I can't buy any new games at the moment. It is only about a year old.

One of the latest games I can play on this computer is Flight Simulator 2002 not 2004, 2002. BTW...the Gateway ran this game on its lowest settings.

If the games require me to upgrade my computer every time a new one comes out, screw ‘em, they aren't going to get any business from me.

Yea, i remember when you could buy pre-build computers that played games with alright settings.

Best i seen in Currys/PCWorld/Dixons is an ATi 9200

I think Doom3 has poor graphical optimizations, i have played the source engine and it is much smoother, even on high settings. For Doom3 we need x800/6800 for good looks and high frames. HL2 appears to need a lot less.

Hopefully devs like Valve and the like will pressure the companies to change the way they work.

Then again i could be wrong and HL2 will run like s**t =)

~t0m

I found out that it just sucks to be poor and I know all about it!

I still don't think you guys are realizing what you're asking.

Games ten years ago were barely hardware accelerated, if at all. You played at 320x240, or 640x480 if you were lucky. You played in 8-bit color, or 16-bit color for the scant few games that were hardware accelerated. You played with entire game levels that had 25,000 polygons and walls that had ONE texture on them that was 256x256 in resolution and had 8 bits of color. Often you played against other monsters/characters that were SPRITES and not even 3d. You played with BILINEAR filtering, without antialiasing, and with framerates in the 20's and 30's at most.

Five years ago you were finally playing in 16 bit and 32 bit color, at resolutions as high as 1024x768. Almost nobody was using AA, most everyone was trying to use trilinear but not everyone could. You were still playing games that had less than 250,000 triangles in the entire level (including monsters that were finally now in 3D). You were playing games that had had the ability to multitexture, but it certainly wasn't multitexturing everything. You were still playing with 8-bit palletized textures, but at least now in resolutions of 512x512 and sometimes even as large as 1024x1024. And you were still getting framerates near the 30's unless you were playing at low rez.

Today you're playing games where the creatures have more geometry than entire GAMES did ten years ago. You're playing games that have more texture data than a lot of computers had harddrive space ten years ago. You're playing games beginning at 1024x768 in 32 bit color, and often times trying to go higher. YOu're EXPECTING at least some level of AA and anisotropic filtering, on top of your trilinear filtering, on top of your 32 bit 2048x2048 textures. And you're wanting it to perform at least 60fps or you're not happy.

So again, do you know what you're asking?

yes, I'm asking for the price of this crap to be less than what a whole console system is. The X-box2 is going to have ATI graphics as good as or better than x800 series PCI-E cards (this coming from ATI themselves) not to mention that it'll do high def 1080i which the current x-box does, plus it'll have a blue-ray or HD-DVD drive, a hard drive, wireless and cat5/6 ethernet connection and a gamepad. This is going to cost $499.99) Again too much IMHO but you get a lot more than you do with just a video card which is running about the same price as the whole console and I doubt will fall THAT much by the time these systems debut in Fall 2005.

theMonster said:

yes, I'm asking for the price of this crap to be less than what a whole console system is. The X-box2 is going to have ATI graphics as good as or better than x800 series PCI-E cards (this coming from ATI themselves) not to mention that it'll do high def 1080i which the current x-box does, plus it'll have a blue-ray or HD-DVD drive, a hard drive, wireless and cat5/6 ethernet connection and a gamepad. This is going to cost $499.99) Again too much IMHO but you get a lot more than you do with just a video card which is running about the same price as the whole console and I doubt will fall THAT much by the time these systems debut in Fall 2005.

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So now let's talk about your console:

As with the PS2, the DreamCast, the N64 and the XBOX, the parent companies of these consoles don't make their money on the console itself. You do know that Microsoft gets a percentage from each and every XBOX game that sells, right? If nobody buys an XBOX, then nobody buys their games. Therefore, it's in their very best interest to price their console at a semi-reasonable level so that they can sell games. More games = more money into Microsoft's coffers to make up for the lack of profit on the actual console.

You can't tell me you don't know this, because a LOT of XBOX's were sold at a loss just to get them out into the public's hands. And that's pretty common knowledge.

Now let's go back to computers.

How much money does Sapphire make when you buy Doom 3? How much money does BFG Tech make when you buy FarCry? How much money does PowerColor make when you buy Sims 2? Screw the middlemen, let's get the BIIIIG picture -- how much money does ATI make when you buy HL2? How much money does NVIDIA make when you buy Rome Total War?

Can you guess? Let me give you a hint, it's closely related to the number of FINGERS you have on your feet. It's precisely the number of AMD processors that come out of Intel's Malaysia plant. It's similar to the number of American flags stitched to Osama Bin Laden's underdrawers.

So, let's ask again why console manufacturers are able to sell massive quantites of consoles at a LOSS while computer parts manufacturers actually have to show a profit per piece...

Albuquerque said:

I still don't think you guys are realizing what you're asking.

Games ten years ago were barely hardware accelerated, if at all. You played at 320x240, or 640x480 if you were lucky. You played in 8-bit color, or 16-bit color for the scant few games that were hardware accelerated. You played with entire game levels that had 25,000 polygons and walls that had ONE texture on them that was 256x256 in resolution and had 8 bits of color. Often you played against other monsters/characters that were SPRITES and not even 3d. You played with BILINEAR filtering, without antialiasing, and with framerates in the 20's and 30's at most.

Five years ago you were finally playing in 16 bit and 32 bit color, at resolutions as high as 1024x768. Almost nobody was using AA, most everyone was trying to use trilinear but not everyone could. You were still playing games that had less than 250,000 triangles in the entire level (including monsters that were finally now in 3D). You were playing games that had had the ability to multitexture, but it certainly wasn't multitexturing everything. You were still playing with 8-bit palletized textures, but at least now in resolutions of 512x512 and sometimes even as large as 1024x1024. And you were still getting framerates near the 30's unless you were playing at low rez.

Today you're playing games where the creatures have more geometry than entire GAMES did ten years ago. You're playing games that have more texture data than a lot of computers had harddrive space ten years ago. You're playing games beginning at 1024x768 in 32 bit color, and often times trying to go higher. YOu're EXPECTING at least some level of AA and anisotropic filtering, on top of your trilinear filtering, on top of your 32 bit 2048x2048 textures. And you're wanting it to perform at least 60fps or you're not happy.

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Very well put.

Honestly, the price increases that have happened so far aren't that bad (or surprising). I know most of us, me included, can't afford the latest and greatest, but we can easily get by on mid-range products that do a pretty good job. I remember my dad paying around $400 US in 1988 for a VGA video card and another $300 for a 14" monitor and he said he got a good deal. These types of prices have been around for ages, it just depends on how we view things.

I do agree that upgrading has become more of a pain than it used to be, and I remember a time when a P133 was the minimum spec for the longest time, but at the same time, it's good that better games are coming out.

As for a conspiracy, I'm not really sure. It does make sense on quite a few levels, but then again, it could just be bad coding.

lol i bet know one knows that the dreamcast is still up to par to the xbox and the ps2 just cause it was made before them dont mean didly it was ahead of its time and it was not marketed right thats why it failed look at the price it sold for it sold for less then the darn cards sell for yea so the company makes money on the games also but so do the card companys if it says built to run best on ati i bet ati gets money for there logo and name on the game same with nvidia so dont tell me that the price is justified i make 800 a month and i have to pay for a car gas and insruance and after all that i only have 200 left i dont see why i should wait like 6 months to buy a card that wont be top of the line then its dumb why not build a card that will last a year or more at the top not 6 months heck cars last a year a video card can last that long also

Yea 3dmark05 is graphical but i should get more frames then 1!!!!! So i believe it has all sorts of encoding or what not. So that if you get a x800 or 6800 youre frames will go to like 70 with everything at full aa and af. Shoot my friends 9800xt only gets 1frame, wait hold on i saw 2 for like a second, and that card should own that benchmark. Especially with his 3.0c and xms memory. So its a bunch of balony on the benchmark, im still able to play doom3 1024x768 with medium graphics and get a constant of 60-70 and im sure some of those scenes are more graphical than 3dmark05.

A1Killer said:

its dumb why not build a card that will last a year or more at the top not 6 months heck cars last a year a video card can last that long also

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Now let's be real about this for a second:

How many cars "at the top" can you currently afford? You're talking about $200,000+ vehicles. And how many of those "at the top" cars stay at the top for more than a year? Can you say "next model year" with me?

There is no such thing as buying a car that's AT the top and stays there, just like there's no such thing with basically ANY consumer-level product. Buy a top-of-the-line TV this year, and there will be a much better one available next year. Buy a top-of-the-line digital camera this year, and there will be a much better one next year. This is the inevitable drift of technology, and nobody on this forum or even on this planet is going to slow it down in the near future.

Again, I see that people are making these statments without really having any knowledge of what they're saying or what they're asking. Think about this a little harder before you come back with your next analogous story...

Not saying anything bad about the x800's, god knows there great cards and we all want one.

Jacobman said:

Yea 3dmark05 is graphical but i should get more frames then 1!!!!! So i believe it has all sorts of encoding or what not. So that if you get a x800 or 6800 youre frames will go to like 70 with everything at full aa and af. Shoot my friends 9800xt only gets 1frame, wait hold on i saw 2 for like a second, and that card should own that benchmark. Especially with his 3.0c and xms memory. So its a bunch of balony on the benchmark, im still able to play doom3 1024x768 with medium graphics and get a constant of 60-70 and im sure some of those scenes are more graphical than 3dmark05.

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Three things wrong with your paragraph:

#1. You didn't pay attention to my last explanation. That part with the 1fps? Yeah, THAT PART ISN'T TESTING YOUR VIDEO CARD, IT'S TESTING YOUR CPU.. See the computer in my signature? it got 1fps too, with my watercooled, voltmodded, reflashed, unlocked and overclocked X800Pro Vivo. It's not your video card, PAY ATTENTION, it's your CPU because *gasp* it's a CPU benchmark right at that point.

#2. You're pulling numbers out of thin air on framerate with new video cards. The rig in my signature again? Yeah, it pulls about 30-40fps in 3Dmark05 -- that's without AA and AF.

#3. You are comparing a full-on benchmark application with an actual game. Benchmarks are for stress-testing hardware to it's limits and documenting those limits. Games are for entertainment. Benchmarks ARE NOT GAMES.


I'm not defending any one company, I'm not defending 3DMark or their inane benchmarks. What I am trying to show you people is that your requests don't make sense.

Why are you not crying out to BMW to make an $20,000 290hp leather-trimmed Bose-equipped sportcar with a 10 year warranty? You know "they" can do it, right? Obviously a cheap $7000 Kia Rio can offer a 10 year warranty, and I can get leather interior from a $13,000 Ford ZX2, and I can get a Bose radio from the store for $200, and I can get 290HP from a V8 motor off the shelf for like $2000. What's the big rip?

Anyone else?