When graphics cards ceased to interest me

When the top of the line started costing above $200.

Graphics cards have become the porches and ferraris of the pc-industry. The show-off quality driving sales.

Ofcourse I admire the engineering of a Porche as much as anyone -at the same time I don´t really want one because I have better things to do with a million dollars than show off. And the latest generation of graphic cards starts at $600. It provides twice the rendering power of last years.

So how can you see the difference? A guide for the rest of us:

Half Life 2 is a demanding modern game. I will use it to demonstrate.

I installed it first on pc with a p4 3.2 ghz HT processor(a fast one) and 1 gb of RAM. The machine had an ATI 9200 graphic card. This costs about 20, 30 bucks.
It is a directx8 card, meaning it could not support the full glory of graphics in the game, still -it played the game well and without hickup in the 1280x1024 resolution required to drive the LCD screen(LCD screens have only resolution and trying to run them in another resolution makes the picture look horrible).

Friends who came over said the game looked "impressive", and "never seen anything so cool" etc.

Around that time I built another computer, it had an Athlon64 3200 and 1 gb RAM(about the same speed as the other one). I put an ATI 9600 in it -this card costs about 60-70 bucks. It has directx9 and thus supports all the eye-candy of the game. At first nobody saw the difference, but when we switched back to the other machine everybody said that the image was more grey and lifeless. Switching back again -everyone agreed that this was better, more vivid colours. Indeed, I quite agree.

So now, while I get all the eye-candy in a high rez with plenty of frame-rate -why should I pay for a card that costs ten times as much?

Because I want the Porche because it is a Porche -not because it is better.

The card costing ten times as much is ofcoure *alot* faster, it allows me turn on two more features(I tried this on the 9600 -it can run the features but not with framerate) -namely antialiasing and it was hard to tell the difference, not worth ten times more for sure -and anisotropic filtering. Anisotropic filtering is easier to spot, it adds more depth to the image in a readily detectable way. But it doesn´t look *that* much better, I´d pay 25% more for it.

I now have an nvidia fx5500 -just bought it because my last card died. I payed about 70 bucks for it. It supports directx9 and therefore has all the eye-candy.

I´d buy an ATI 9800 or an nvidia 5900 used if I could get them for less than a hundred.

I´m quite happy to drive a Toyota, I just want transportation. If I want to impress the girls I open my mouth, I don´t need an expensive toy to speak for me.

Besides, PC-gaming must surely be coming to an end soon -the next-gen consoles will hit the market like a truck. Demolishing anything not strong enough to stand up to the assault. I´ll buy a ps3 before I buy a *gaming* graphic card, at current prices -I could probably by the ps3, the xbox360 and the nintendo revolution for the price of single high-end graphic card.

b