NightF0x
Gallente
Chicken Coup Raiders
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Posted - 2009.01.15 01:42:00 -
[1]
interesting perspective but I disagree with the part about developers relying on gamers to support them through hardware upgrades.
You say that video games are driving video card makers for new cards, I say not so fast (atleast not entirely). There is an entire market of Graphic Designers and Engineers that require top end graphic cards, more so than gamers. They may not have the same quantity but application cards cost nearly 3x's what gamer cards cost. The last two that I purchased were an ATI and a Nvidia card, both were well over $700 each. Thought you should know that gamers aren't the only driving force in video cards.
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NightF0x
Gallente
Chicken Coup Raiders
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Posted - 2009.01.15 03:51:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Cadde
Originally by: MotherMoon
why was the 9 series released 2 years after the 8 series with not much if any performance increase?
I mean I know that laptop 8 series are much more poweerful than the normal desktop 8 series. But then why were the 9 series released at the same time as the 8000m series?
First of all, November 2006 -> February 2008 is not 2 years but rather 1 year and 2 months.
It might disturb you to learn some truth behind the 8 and 9 series though, not much had been done to the GeForce 9 series to make it any better. Also, nVidia happily re-labeled old 8800 GT cards to 9600 GS because they sported the same performance. In many cases the GeForce 8 series OUTPERFORMED GeForce 9 series models.
However, the 9 series was a card released with some modifications to how the chip was laid out. Attribute it to a fresh start flaw if you will.
And don't forget that when Vista and DX 10 was released, it flopped harder than any previous release. That could have contributed to the problems and now the 9 series (with the problems fixed) perform as they should.
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As to games vs graphics cards vs rendering artists. More often than not, professionals use hardware that isn't made available to the public. And in the cases where they do, if they could ever come close to making a noticeable impact on cards bought then we sure do have too many "professionals" on this planet. As a matter of fact, it's more likely that amateurs outnumber "professionals" in GPU sales. And as home users, i would like to group them with gamers into a main group called ENTHUSIASTS.
You might be surprised to see that it's more than just rendering artist that need high quality cards. A lot of the 3-D solid modeling programs for engineering require top-end cards. While only about 10% of companies use 3-D solid modeling, most of the companies that do have more than 1 seat of software. I know one company that has over 70 seats of a particular modeling package. Assuming that most of these cards are about 3x's what gamer cards run, then that's 210 gamer cards worth. I'm not saying that the sales outnumber gamers but it would bet that sales dollars wise they are a lot closer than you might think. |