The Machines Behind the Magic

The Machines Behind the Magic

UploadVR

The economic principle

I’m exploring is “Because of choices, people choose. All choices have an opportunity cost.” My research question to help me study the economic principle is “Given a scarcity of money, how do individuals choose what brand of graphics cards to purchase when building their computer?”

 The article published in Make Use Of titled “The Best 6 Budget Graphics Cards for Cheap Gaming” demonstrates this economic principle by showing different choices of graphics cards ,the price of graphics cards, and the performance of the respective graphics cards.

 First, I want to point out that in terms of affordable graphics cards, you have to be prepared to receive lower frame rates for high end games, hence “cheap gaming.” In the article, Phillips stated that your graphics card depends on what you want to play. Latest graphics cards will max out the settings on new releases while cheaper graphics cards are better suited for older games.

 Second, cheap graphics cards aren’t that bad. For most popular titles, according to the article, you probably won’t be dropping more than $300 for a graphics card that will meet high standards for very popular games that you likely play. For example, the Nvidia GTX 1060-3GB is very affordable at about $230 and it can run a few popular games greatly. To name a few, on max settings:

• Fortnite 91 FPS
• PUBG 65 FPS,
• Overwatch 93 FPS,
• Battlefield 1 56 FPS

These frames are perfectly fine and you don’t notice many changes in FPS after 60 FPS anyway.


 Third, gamers have been tending to do make a different choice in terms of cheap graphics cards. Instead of buying a cheap, nicely built current graphics card for cheaper gaming, people have been buying the top tier graphics cards of the last generation instead. For example, the The Nvidia GTX 980 and the AMD R9 Fury X. These graphics cards have lots of power and can even run the same games as current graphics cards with still consistent frame rates.

 In my next blog post I will research the question: What is the opportunity cost of different brands and types of computer parts?