good time to buy graphics card?

[justice]

I'm looking to buy a mainstream graphics card, currently looking at a geforce 9600 GT but later this month both Nvidia and Ati will introduce new cards. Is anyone here that follows the market and can tell me how that will impact on the price of these midrange cards? I don't know enough about it and have not been following this sector much. Cheers

For example I'd want to wait out if prices would drop by 20% or more.

[Darwin]

Can't answer  your question, Justice. In fact, I'm here to add a more generic question of my own that I've been mulling over the past month. Basically, is NOW the time to buy electronics and other goods, full stop? With the price of fuel in the stratosphere and with no let up in "fuel inflation" in sight, will electronics and other goods begin to increase in price significantly? Think about a computer, an amalgam of parts produced all over the world that is then itself shipped elsewhere... Frightening to consider the cumulative effect of the cost of shipping being passed on to the consumer...

I have an ulterior motive in that I have big gift card to use at Staples. It's good for two years from issue (about 22 months now) and was issued as a warranty buy out on a notebook that failed. We don't NEED another notebook/desktop at the moment, but I wonder if the $750 Core 2 Duo notebook deals that are everywhere right now are going to be a thing of the past soon. At current prices I can use the card to cover most of the purchase price and pay for taxes and an upgrade to 4GB RAM out of my own pocket and not be "out of pocket" too much (perhaps $350 - less than $100 if I keep my pants on and don't go for the RAM upgrade)...

[f0dder]

Hm, hadn't thought of the fuel price issue...

but I'd definitely wait a bit if I were to upgrade my graphics card. The GeForce 9xxx cards are basically the same as the 8xxx card, except somewhat different performance and power consumption - but the basic architecture is the same (in other words, shame on nvidia for calling it a 9xxx series). The new GPUs "coming soon" are supposed to be new architecture (and probably higher performance).

That should push down prices within too long, and a mid-range next-gen card tends to have about the same performance as a current-gen highish-range card.

[Lashiec]

Also, from the rumors ATI seems to have a decent lineup to counterattack nVidia, so they'll play the price card, and you know what that means... PRICE WARS!! :D

About the fuel, recent increases in price didn't seem to have any effect on components, so I think they may stay like that for a while, or certain types will go down. The only one which will definitely go up is RAM modules, because it sank like a stone, and memory chip manufacturers can't keep up much more with the losses.

I also understand that fuel does have a long-term impact on general product prices, so maybe the worst is still to come. Certain analysts warned a while ago about the possible impact of fuel price scaling up and the current health of American economy on various electronic companies (most notably, AMD/ATI), but I never trusted analysts too much :D. I think that at least considering hard drives, processors and GPUs, competition between the various companies involved with them will keep the prices low.

[Darwin]

Hope you're right, Lashiec!

[oldfart]

Concerning graphics cards, I recently upgraded my battered old machine with an NVidia graphics card, a 6200 with 512Mb of RAM.  My old ATI card had only 128 megs of RAM and I had purchased a Samsung SyncMaster 206BW LCD monitor with a native resolution of 1650x1050 so I figured I needed the extra memory. 
While running some benchmark tests I was astounded when 2D graphics scored a 12 on a scale that goes to 1000!  I did some looking around and found a few message boards where people were bringing up this same sort of problem.  The general thought was that something was seriously kinky with NVidia cards.  A friend with a slightly newer NVidia card found similar benchmark scores with his card.  He went to Tiger or Newegg or Geeks and picked up an ATI card to swap out and recheck the benchmark numbers but he hasn't gotten back to me with the results yet. 
Have any of you folks noticed anything like this with NVidia cards? 
I'm running a P4 266Ghz system with 1GB of RAM and XP SP3. 

[f0dder]

oldfar: probably just a test that's biased either ATi cards, or very high-end cards?

The only problem I've seen with nvidia cards that can give very low performance, is if you use screen rotation... then it feels like acceleration on windows shown on the the rotated monitor is basically turned off.

Also, does the 6200 card really have 512meg ram, or is it a TurboCache model that actually uses system ram?

[oldfart]

Howdy F0dder, The card has 512meg of RAM onboard.  The discussions I've seen about this questions whether the fault is in the card or the test and nobody seems to have come up with an answer yet.  Some suspect faulty drivers while others feel the test has some bugs.  I just wondered if anyone here had come across this problem and discovered any answers.  Its not something I worry about as I don't do much gaming anymore but I am tech support for all my family and several friends and I like to know about stuff like this before recommending upgrades.  Thanks for the  input.