Digital Home Thoughts: NVidia Fermi's Up The GTS 450

"In any case, the star of the show today is GTS 450, the newest member of the GeForce family and intended for gaming at resolutions around 1680x1050. It’s clocked at 783MHz for the core, 1566MHz for the shaders, and 902MHz (3.6GHz effective) for its GDDR5 RAM. Currently it’s only being offered in a 1GB configuration; however we wouldn’t be shocked to see a 512MB part further down the line at even more budget-oriented prices."

I find it depressing that I find many computers that have less RAM than the GTS 450 has Video RAM. It does make sense, after a fashion, as GPUs are just as complex as CPUs (if not more) and the demands placed on them are just as high, especially when it comes to gaming or parallel processing. I have to admit that one thing that really baffles me is the whole video card market. There seems to be a video card for just about every price point, some only differentiated by $10. From $50 to $500, there are maybe a score of different models from each manufacturer vying for your attention. How is an informed computer buyer supposed to make a choice when there are more video cards to pick from than tickets sold for the New York Lotto?