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The only bit that really confused me was a sentence towards the end of the article:
Although Nvidia claims to have invented the first GPU with the GeForce 256…
- I have never heard this claim before.
- The GeForce 256 came out in 1999, years after cards from makers like 3DFX, Matrox, S3, etc. I’d figure something like the S3 ViRGE (Video and Rendering Graphics Engine) would hold the claim. That 2D/3D card came out in 1995.
That really depends on how you consider a GPU. Is it a card that can handle both 2d and 3d acceleration on board (like the S3 virge or the voodoo banshee) or a single chip that can handle both 2d and 3d acceleration (just like the 256)? The latter definition makes the GeForce 256, the very first “GPU”, but not the first card that does both 2d and 3d. That can be attributed to a myriad of cards including the ATI rage series, the banshee, the S3 virge and savage, Nvidia’s own riva TNT and TNT2, and even matrox g200 series.
Surprised the 5700xt isn’t on this list.
The 5700xt!!! Are you crazy. That’s the worst AMD/ATI card I’ve ever owned. Driver crash,crash,crash,crash,crash. Fixed after 6 months my ass.
What did it do to make it to a top list? even AMD forgot about it.
I heard nothing but driver issue complaints during the rnda1 era so that doesn’t surprise me at all
5700xt is by far the worse gpu ever released. Its has the highest rma rates and the worse drivers. It is down as the worst possible gpu’s to exist.
Where’s R9 290X?
Yeah…This list is a joke without the 290X.
The 290X wasn’t even close to being as competitive as the also-omitted 4870
Nowhere, like it should be. The launch was a disaster because AMD pushed the clock/power targets extremely high in order to “compete” with the 780 and 780 Ti, with the end result being a jet engine in terms of noise.
It wasn’t until February before MSI and ASUS released better cooled cards, at which point the damage from reviews and lack of holiday sales had accumulated.
In the 7970’s case, AMD had at least the benefit of being 3 months early compared to Nvidia.
What are you on about, nvidia had to lower price on 780 twice and issue an emergency SKU in form of 780Ti to be able to compete on price/performance with Hawaii. R9 290 (non-X) was a steal at its price considering how long it managed to stay relevant in the years ahead. GCN driver improvement also added a significant chunk of performance (9k GS in FS at release and around 15k with OC and driver improvements 3 years later). Also, Kepler blower cards were also loud, so the point is sort of not a point at all
How would you have known that the 290 would perform better in 2016?
As for the price cuts, I remember the 780 Ti launch, and the 780 launch was effectively a cut from the Titan.
The 780 price cut was the reason for the jet engine cooler on the 290-series in the first place.
The 290X wasn’t that impressive at launch. Ran hot and wasn’t cheap enough to be a good value.
it was faster than the 780 and literally $250 less than the MSRP of the 780 and the 780ti wouldn’t come out for quite a while
I feel it still deserves a spot on the list. Also the heat issues were mostly addressed with Sapphire’s coolers for example. Just seems highly critical to write it off, at least to me.
What are you talking about man it was on par if not faster than the first Titan…
Tom’s literally called it the “Titan killer”. Yes the reference cooler ran hot and sounded like a hair dryer, but the price to performance was amazing. And the AIB cards had some great models, like the Sapphire Toxic.
It’s funny how they call the 5870 the best AMD GPU of all time.
They are not wrong, but it’s also their biggest strategic mistake ever: right when they had Nvidia in the ropes and had a chance to crush them with top of the line performance by an insane margin, they decided on they brain dead small die strategy, leaving an escape route for a Nvidia to still remain on top with absolute performance even if their performance per area was a disaster.
It’s just another example of AMD marketing shooting themselves in the foot.
AMD didn’t have an alternative other than to go “small” die, since they needed margins and they couldn’t execute huge dies given their cost.
Yup. NVIDIA was able to pull ahead simply through brute force. Sure they ran hot and consumed a lot of power but that was negligible when they were doubling performance every generation.
I remember wanting a 9700 or 9800 pro so bad. But I was just a poor teenager and could only afford a shit GeForce mx440.
My 9500 was a beast. Just a slightly cut down 9700. It was faster than my buddies 9600.
Second video card I ever owned. After my voodoo 3.
I remember being a kid and selling stuff to save up for a 9600XT, the infamous Half Life 2 bundle. Had to wait for the launch and that’s how i met Steam
9800 pro was my first gpu purchase and it blew my mind. was able to play half life 2 with MSAA and everything looked smooth instead of the jagged mess I was used to.
I have had 9500 and softmoded it into 9700
The 9800 Pro was the real best GPU, due to the dx9 bug fixes. I also think the list was mostly wrong. I’d say 9800 Pro, 1900XT, 390, Vega 56, 6700XT.
Other points: Radeon 9000, cheap FULL dx8. Nothing else came close. GCN 1 (7970) was crap for drivers, and did not support encoding or freesync. Polaris (480) was completely pointless for 390 users, Vega 56 was the real upgrade, especially if you bought on the fire sale prices. Vega outlasted Pascal. Has HBCC. The 480 was the late to the party card, and you didn’t get the new features of Vega. It was ok, and a good price, not amazing.
For right now, we have the 7800 and 7900. But I wouldn’t count top 5 for being new.
Nvidia: TnT2: You didn’t need a Geforce, could completely skip them until dx8. 470 (best value) or 580 3GB: You could skip Kepler entirely with the 3GB. I wouldn’t count anything else due to bad value or AMD having better alternatives for the money. This is why I don’t count Pascal, because you needed a 1080TI for it to be worth it, and Vega 56 was better for the money. You can maybe count the 12GB 3060, but come on with the 1080p, that’s too dated.
It was an HP PC without an agp slot, so I could only get a cheap pci card.
This was me, a poor high school teenager with the MX440 64MB trying to play Counter-Strike the best I could. All my rich friends had 9700 Pro’s or even 9800 Pro’s. The evening of my graduation open house, I took $200 of the money I got and went to Best Buy and bought an X700 Pro 256MB AGP. I finally had something that beat my rich friends, until they all got X850’s or 6800 Ultra’s.
i was buying Radeon 9000 pro instead GF MX440, at least 9000pro have pixel shader
I loved my 9000pro, used it until I bought a FX550 which kind of sucked.
FX series worst cards ever, i saw in my life
This was me too, except I had the mx440se. Trust Nvidia to make the special edition significantly worse than the normal model. My mates made the same mistake and we used to call it the “Shit Edition”
Managed to move to the 9600pro after saving my pennies all year, was a huge upgrade. Those were the days…
Noooooo! Shoulda went with the 9500 !
you mean a geforce 2 …
7970 should’ve been #2 or #1 IMO. It was their greatest GPU in terms of overclockability. It launched at 925MHz. My reference one clocked to 1.3GHz on the stock cooler (40% OC) and ram also went to the moon (not too far though, e.g. it gained perf, not lost it due to ECC like some people do). Loud but fast. It was faster than the next generation from Nvidia lmao.
Sure it was a golden sample but damn it was insane to get that much performance for free.
not to mention you can just unlock the 7950
phenomenal card…i went back to buy one last year for my period-correct rig, ditto for the 8800 GTX
7950 was also a great card, save the money, unlock it and they also can OC very well.
Rx580
My first Radeon was a 9600SE (Abit with LED COOLER!!) Yes it was with 64bit memory, but after a mx440 it was lightning fast, and I got for the price of a TNT2 that time, sonwas a really good deal.
Total bullshit imo.
My Sapphire RX480 just finished its long service and earned its well deserved rest. My new Rx 5600 OEM has some very big shoes to fill.
My first ever GPU was ATI 9200 I got in Christmas, god I remember the good times playing RollerCoaster Tycoon on it :)
Hey I’ve owned/have two of these GPUS. My current GPU is the RX 6800 XT and my previous one was the ASUS ROG Matrix HD 7970 Platinum. Before my current GPU was a RX Vega 64 LC.
5700xt should have been on the list, aged so well….
- 6800XT FTW!
Feel incredibly lucky to have snatched one only 4 days after launch at £659
And for American folks out there… that’s including tax.
I’d add the RX 6800. Perfect balance between Performance, power consumption and plenty of VRAM.