Video Card Monopoly!

[martin_metal_88]

Originally Posted by AkG

Co.....smell?.......My eyes! My eyes! Warn peeps before you do that again MM :)~

You like it when my english fail's me don't you;)

[AkG]

Nah, your English is better than my French (all I know is how to swear and order beer in french...and couple other similar minded phrases like "how much" ). So its all good...and it was freaking hilarious intentional or not. :)

[martin_metal_88]

Originally Posted by AkG

Nah, your English is better than my French (all I know is how to swear and order beer in french...and couple other similar minded phrases like "how much" ). So its all good...and it was freaking hilarious intentional or not. :)

dude, if you know to swear and order beer then...you know everything about Quebec people french

[_dangtx_]

well, a third dog would be good in the bunch. keep up competition, maybe lower prices(unless he's part of the round table too?) :)

those days are long gona...1999..no 2000 was the last year?

since we cant count s3 as a serious contender..can we?

[MpG]

Originally Posted by slik

The problem we serious gamers and other video enthusiasts have in wanting a 'Super Card' is simple. There are only two brands available. Period.

Um, no. The "problem" is that we serious gamers and other video enthusiasts have is that we want something that not many other people do. Simple as that. The world is FULL of people who don't want super-cards, and when you want something unique, you pay extra.

Really, I'm not really seeing the typical evidences of a monopoly - i.e. sky-high profit margins (both companies have their own griefs), small improvements between generations (We've come to expect 50% improvements between generations), price collusion (recall when ATI's 4800-series cards forced NVidia to drop their 200-series prices), and horrible software (honestly,, I'd say both have fairly consistent software). There have been some bad eggs, such as Nvidia's 6800 GTX and ATI's 1900XTX, etc, but nothing like the massive price differentials that have have been demanded for incremental improvements in memory, CPU, or storage performance.

[lKashl]

In my opinion ATI and NVIDIA have been providing us with substantial performance increases and reasonable prices for a while now and the intensity of competition between them is more than sufficient. I mean ATI are already prepping the 6 series (which is RUMOURED to be substantially more powerful than the 5 series) just about a year after the release of the 5 series. In addition the cards of the top tiers have an abundance of power to cope with anything this gen of software might throw at them (except maybe Crysis :P).

If you want to blame anyone blame the software developers for not providing enough incentive for graphical technology increases, i mean look at how few DX11 games have hit the market and how few games there are that are actually capable of utilising all the graphical horsepower of high end cards like the 5850, 5870, GTX 460 and GTX 480

Originally Posted by geokilla

And why didn't you complain about the CPU market? It's dominated by only Intel and AMD. Sure there are other companies like IBM, but I haven't heard much about them releasing CPUs to us consumers, assuming they still produce CPUs.

IBM still produce CPU's, just not for the consumer PC market, they still make units for super computers, the Cell Processor for the PS3, the XBOX 360's CPU and if i remmeber correctly were responsible for integrating the XBOX SLIM's GPU and CPU onto a singular die. They would rape up if they entered the PC consumer marekt again I reckon :)

[Zero82z]

Originally Posted by lKashl

They would rape up if they entered the PC consumer marekt again I reckon :)

Unlikely. IBM does not make x86 CPUs.

[Killswitch]

Originally Posted by martin_metal_88

this thread smell like OP need more epeen...maybe I wasn't clear.

Really? Where did he say that?

He is retired, and he's an avid gamer who just wants the best products he can get for the best PC gaming experience possible in regards to video on a single monitor and sound through a pair of headphones. Plain and simple. He's not the kind of guy to go around tooting his horn saying "Hey everybody, my PC is better then yours!!"

Get your head out of your ass man.

[technix]

Originally Posted by Slik

The problem we serious gamers and other video enthusiasts have in wanting a 'Super Card' is simple. There are only two brands available. Period. When you have no real competition and no "real' control over thier prices, we the buyers are at thier mercy. With the technology easily available today,we should have much much better. Look at what they are able to do making movies. And they have been doing it for a long time. Until another manufacturer or maybe even two enter the fray,there will be no motivation for Nvidia or Radeon to give us better products and support.Drivers etc. If you think about it, we can't even boycott. I don't have a lot of money to invest in a new company. but what little I do put away,I would put into a new Video Card market. I would do it in a heart beat. There is a whole bunch of money to be made in a market dominated by only two. Oh well. Who knows.

I agree with this guy, the OP.

But, how much would it cost for startup? Plus, you know these companies are probably providing obstacles for newcomers (aka barriers to entry) so any attempt would be a lot of trouble so it's not just dollars. They have access to the resources and the individual brands or manufacturers have deals with the bare bones hardware components so....

What is really troubling is the cost-cutting so when you pay a lot of money for these cards, eventually, the quality goes down. Look at the reference cards that come out and then later, the components seem like they've been minimized or there were shortcuts from the companies. These get disguised as 'customized cooling' so if they are great, but I wonder if the priority was a better cooling solution or a shortcut in order to maximize profits.

Anyway, lots of people are getting rich on these cards and I'm not even going to mention workstation cards. Oops...

Even if ATI or Nvidia are said to not be doing all that well, someone is....

[Zero82z]

There used to be several other GPU companies competing with ATI and nVidia. The reason they're gone now is because they weren't able to effectively compete, and they either failed or went into other markets. The high-performance GPU market exists as it is not due to lack of competition, but because the competition is pretty much over at this point.