sometimes Alb peoples needs for a computer change over time, like mine. as im not gaming as much or any at all. imo it would be nice to have a better low end card worthy of my $$. since i consider making a mini computer for dvd/blue-ray and recorded show playback.. the higher memory bandwidth from the 128bit would be nice when using 1080P res.
Playing back BluRay is not bandwidth intensive at all (for a GPU), it's computationally intensive for accelerating H.264 decode. The memory bandwidth could be an entire order of magnitue
lower and the bottleneck would still be the GPU itself.
So, that argument is out. $100 is "low end", unless you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for an AMD 3000+ and a $50 motherboard to plug it into. And if you're on that kind of system, then you aren't going to miss the performance of a 256-bit datapath on your GPU.
I dont' understand why it's that difficult to understand...
A tiny bit over $100 right now (not to mention, where that price will be in two months when NVIDIA comes back with something) will get you almost 50% more performance than a 7900GT. So you just came from a $200 video card to a $100 video card, and you're complaining?
I believe the real problem is that you don't understand what you're asking for. You attribute all this board cost to ATI, but you completely ignore the cost for the company who builds the PCB's and ships the boards. The chip itself is not that expensive, perhaps 20-30% of the entire cost of the board (well, until you get to the higher-end GPU's). The vast majority of your cost is from the PCB, all the layers and tracing that make up that PCB, all the supplimentary electronics on that PCB, and then cooling, labelling, packaging, distribution, and advertising.
If you want to reduce cost bigtime, you need to target the PCB costs. And that's where less layers = less traces = less supplimentary hardware = less cost to you. So when you are complaining about lack of 256-bit memory bus, you're also forgettng that in doing so they just saved you probably 30% of the cost of the PCB: three layers instead of four, four hundred less traces, less power supply regulation issues, less ground plane worries, less EMI crosstalk problems that need shielding, the list goes on.