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A quick search shows the 8800GT was released in Oct 2007 and was 180 GBP. [0] Using an inflation calculator this comes out to 256 GBP today, [1] so about the sa

by lhl 6y ago

A quick search shows the 8800GT was released in Oct 2007 and was 180 GBP. [0] Using an inflation calculator this comes out to 256 GBP today, [1] so about the same price as the cards you're looking at. That being said, it looks like even in 2019 average weekly wages (in GBP) have declined since 2008, so accounting for inflation, most Britons are maybe just simply poorer now [2] (2020 of course has been even worse. [3]) Anyway, ignoring all that, IMO gaming is still more affordable than it's ever been - you can get a used Xbox One S for about $100 on eBay, or for PC gaming, you can get a used RX 470 or GTX 1060 for a bit less than that, which are fine GPUs for 1080p gaming performance. Also, even relatively modern AAA games can now be played at low-medium settings at 720 or 1080p30 without a dedicated GPU on a late-model Ryzen APU. [0] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_geforce_8800_gt/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_g... [1] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49328855 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49328855 [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wage-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wage-growth

globular-toast 6y ago
But that was a brand-new, current-gen, mid-high-end Nvidia card back then. I'm looking at previous-gen, used AMD cards. If you look at gaming builds from the last few years it's always a 1080/2080. These cards are essentially the equivalent of the 8800GT back then, ie. the one with high performance that you got if you didn't literally have money to burn. But how people can afford this stuff unless they have no other hobbies I don't know. Maybe the answer is they can't afford it? I'm not a single penny in debt.
- lhl 6y ago
  > If you look at gaming builds from the last few years it's always a 1080/2080. Since you added this after I started writing, I think your idea of what hardware most gamers have is just plain wrong. One only has to look at the Steam Hardware Survey results to see just how few people buy the top-end cards: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon-discrete-gpu-market-share-q3-2019/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon-discrete-gpu-... You can corroborate this w/ JPR's market reports which consistently show that mainstream and midrange cards (<$250) account for almost 80% of AIB sales: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/the-add-in-board-market-decreased-in-q417-from-last-quarter-amd-gained-mark/ https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/the-add-in-board-ma... This also doesn't account, as you've seen from the used market, that most gamers on a budget upgrading can simply sell their previous card and effectively only pay a fraction of the price every time they are upgrading.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Sorry for editing my comment. I see that I was mistaken, or perhaps misled, about what kind of card is actually required to be able to have a decent gaming experience today. You've convinced me that the mid to upper-mid tier is not really that much different to how it was back then. I also should consider that while I was earning a pittance back then compared to what I earn now, I lived with my parents and didn't own a car or anything else really apart from my PC.
    - lhl 6y ago
      Yeah, to be fair, I think that perception that everyone is gaming on (or even needs) very high-end GPUs has of course been purposefully cultivated by GPU vendors (while most sales are from mainstream cards, most profits are from enthusiast and high-end cards). Gamers in particular also seem to get overly hyped for the halo products, and treat whichever brand has better performance there very aspirationally. Nvidia's marketing has also been especially effective at jacking up prices on the highest-end the past couple years. Now that consoles are basically gaming PCs, good gaming performance for AAA titles is increasingly anchored by each console generation, so there's a bit of a shift every 4-5 years - one happening now. There's also an insanely large backlog of games and a huge amount of F2P and competitive games that aim to be playable on iGPUs, which have also advanced considerably over the past few years.
- lhl 6y ago
  OK, just for fun, lets do a brand-new dollar for dollar comparison of what you get for the latest new GPUs in the same price bracket. ~250 GBP on Amazon.co.uk will get you a 6GB GTX 1660Ti or Radeon RX 5600XT. This gives you a GPU that has 6X the memory, and roughly 25X the performance of the card you would get 13 years ago: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-8800-GT-vs-GeForce-GTX-1660-Ti-vs-Radeon-RX-5600-XT/1279vs4045vs4186 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-8800-GT-v... (see also: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-5600-xt.c3474 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-5600-xt.c347...). The 5600XT plays almost every single game at over 60fps @ 1080p (often over 100fps): https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-5600-XT-Desktop-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.459227.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-5600-XT-Desktop-... By every relative and absolute metric, you are getting way more for your money than you did a decade ago, even vs other technology products (eg CPUs have made significantly less performance gains over the same period [0]) or experience (you can play the latest titles at much better fidelity and frame rates than the 8800 GT could for games of that era). Have high end card prices gone up? Sure, due to both to increased demand volatility (multiple waves of crypto booms and busts) as well several generations where Nvidia has simply not had viable competition in the highest performance categories, but even with that in mind, performance/$ has still kept climbing in just about every single category. Note: new generation low-mid range cards still haven't come out yet. Expect another bump in price/performance Q1/Q2 next year (GA106 & GA107 for Nvidia, Navi 22 and 23 for AMD, also potentially Intel's Xe DG2). [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Extreme-Q6850-vs-Intel-i9-10900KF/1024vs3754 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Extreme-Q68...
- phatfish 6y ago
  I got that same card (8800GT) and used it for many years, mainly because it was under £200. I think it was just a great deal at the time. Very likely prices pushed back up after Nvidia grabbed any market share they lost to ATI that caused them to give us a good deal.

by lhl 6y ago

globular-toast 6y ago

But that was a brand-new, current-gen, mid-high-end Nvidia card back then. I'm looking at previous-gen, used AMD cards. If you look at gaming builds from the last few years it's always a 1080/2080. These cards are essentially the equivalent of the 8800GT back then, ie. the one with high performance that you got if you didn't literally have money to burn. But how people can afford this stuff unless they have no other hobbies I don't know. Maybe the answer is they can't afford it? I'm not a single penny in debt.

lhl 6y ago
> If you look at gaming builds from the last few years it's always a 1080/2080. Since you added this after I started writing, I think your idea of what hardware most gamers have is just plain wrong. One only has to look at the Steam Hardware Survey results to see just how few people buy the top-end cards: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon-discrete-gpu-market-share-q3-2019/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon-discrete-gpu-... You can corroborate this w/ JPR's market reports which consistently show that mainstream and midrange cards (<$250) account for almost 80% of AIB sales: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/the-add-in-board-market-decreased-in-q417-from-last-quarter-amd-gained-mark/ https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/the-add-in-board-ma... This also doesn't account, as you've seen from the used market, that most gamers on a budget upgrading can simply sell their previous card and effectively only pay a fraction of the price every time they are upgrading.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Sorry for editing my comment. I see that I was mistaken, or perhaps misled, about what kind of card is actually required to be able to have a decent gaming experience today. You've convinced me that the mid to upper-mid tier is not really that much different to how it was back then. I also should consider that while I was earning a pittance back then compared to what I earn now, I lived with my parents and didn't own a car or anything else really apart from my PC.
  - lhl 6y ago
    Yeah, to be fair, I think that perception that everyone is gaming on (or even needs) very high-end GPUs has of course been purposefully cultivated by GPU vendors (while most sales are from mainstream cards, most profits are from enthusiast and high-end cards). Gamers in particular also seem to get overly hyped for the halo products, and treat whichever brand has better performance there very aspirationally. Nvidia's marketing has also been especially effective at jacking up prices on the highest-end the past couple years. Now that consoles are basically gaming PCs, good gaming performance for AAA titles is increasingly anchored by each console generation, so there's a bit of a shift every 4-5 years - one happening now. There's also an insanely large backlog of games and a huge amount of F2P and competitive games that aim to be playable on iGPUs, which have also advanced considerably over the past few years.
lhl 6y ago
OK, just for fun, lets do a brand-new dollar for dollar comparison of what you get for the latest new GPUs in the same price bracket. ~250 GBP on Amazon.co.uk will get you a 6GB GTX 1660Ti or Radeon RX 5600XT. This gives you a GPU that has 6X the memory, and roughly 25X the performance of the card you would get 13 years ago: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-8800-GT-vs-GeForce-GTX-1660-Ti-vs-Radeon-RX-5600-XT/1279vs4045vs4186 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-8800-GT-v... (see also: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-5600-xt.c3474 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-5600-xt.c347...). The 5600XT plays almost every single game at over 60fps @ 1080p (often over 100fps): https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-5600-XT-Desktop-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.459227.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-5600-XT-Desktop-... By every relative and absolute metric, you are getting way more for your money than you did a decade ago, even vs other technology products (eg CPUs have made significantly less performance gains over the same period [0]) or experience (you can play the latest titles at much better fidelity and frame rates than the 8800 GT could for games of that era). Have high end card prices gone up? Sure, due to both to increased demand volatility (multiple waves of crypto booms and busts) as well several generations where Nvidia has simply not had viable competition in the highest performance categories, but even with that in mind, performance/$ has still kept climbing in just about every single category. Note: new generation low-mid range cards still haven't come out yet. Expect another bump in price/performance Q1/Q2 next year (GA106 & GA107 for Nvidia, Navi 22 and 23 for AMD, also potentially Intel's Xe DG2). [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Extreme-Q6850-vs-Intel-i9-10900KF/1024vs3754 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Extreme-Q68...
phatfish 6y ago
I got that same card (8800GT) and used it for many years, mainly because it was under £200. I think it was just a great deal at the time. Very likely prices pushed back up after Nvidia grabbed any market share they lost to ATI that caused them to give us a good deal.