"Pro" graphics surplus

The so-called "professional" graphics cards are now heavily overpriced .

Some will say that "it's natural", "it always was so".

Well, it was natural in 1990's, when professional graphics cards were really the gems of hardware - but their price was not so high compared to the other hardware prices - best graphics accelerators cost about a quarter of the best monitor ($2500 compared to $9000). And the software part in them could be about 3/4 (some 20-30 thousands of CAD users just could not make software profitable at lesser prices).

To-day software part (based on the implementation of the standard languages) may not cost more than $50 - and latest AMD "semi-professional" ATI FirePro V3700 / V3750 show this. But as we come to the "heavy" professional solutions (really differing from consumer ones only by enabled 8/10/16 bit color switching) the pricing again rises to heavens. Just compare the prices on the latest AMD consumer and professional solutions (have a look at the specialized AMD FireStream 9250 "co-processor", software for which really costs much more than the drivers for the ATI FirePro V8700) :

Consumer cards		Professional cards
Radeon HD 3450 (40 shaders / 256MB GDDR2) - $30-50		ATI FirePro V3700 (40 shaders / 256MB GDDR3) - $100
Radeon HD 3650 (120 shaders / 512MB GDDR2) - $55-85
Radeon HD 3850 (320 shaders / 512MB GDDR3) - $90-200		ATI FirePro V3750 (320 shaders / 256MB GDDR3) - $200
Radeon HD 3870 (320 shaders / 512MB GDDR4) - $100-190
Radeon HD 4670 (320 shaders / 512MB GDDR3) - $90-100		ATI FirePro V5700 (320 shaders / 512MB GDDR3) - $600
Radeon HD 4870 (800 shaders / 1GB GDDR4) - $290-310		ATI FirePro V8700 (800 shaders / 1GB GDDR5) - $1500 AMD FireStream 9250 (800 shaders / 1GB GDDR3) - $1000

Though the FirePro V3700/V3750 really may be called "Pro" solutions only because of enabled 8/10/16 bit color switching, the drivers are essentially the same as for their "older" brothers - FirePro V5700/V8700 (really the V5700 is not much faster than the V3750 - same difference as for Radeon HD 3850 / Radeon HD 4670 - but consumer HD 4670 is usually cheaper than HD 3850).

You can see that AMD is demanding for ATI FirePro V8700 from professional users about $1000 just for nothing (or just for the "pro" name) - two-third of the card cost. Small wonder they would not be selling as "hot cakes" - for bigger part of professionals consumer cards will do nearly the same job at 1/5th of the price.

Please note also the "soap" computing features in all the ATI products:
Cards with 120 or less shaders really need only PCIe 1.1 x4 connection (so, 3/4 of even the PCIe 1.1 slot connection power is lost)
Cards with 320 shaders need only PCIe 1.1 x8 connection
Even Radeon HD 4870 and ATI FirePro V8700 cannot fully utilize PCIe 1.1 x16 connection (may be only Radeon HD 4870 x2 really needs PCIe 2.0, though not sure).

I do not mention NVIDIA here because their solutions are not only much more overpriced, but outdated too.