Should the 5700xt be considered one of the greatest of all time?

madpistol said:
Wait... greatest GPU of all time?

8800 GTX :p
Click to expand...
I have to agree, the 8800 GTX had more than the 2x the performance of the 7900 GTX and unified pixel/vertex shaders were such a good idea that we still use it today.

After that I think the GTX 460 was one hell of a GPU for $230. The stock speed was 675 MHz and people were routinely hitting 850 MHz with a little bit of extra voltage. Mine topped out at 875 MHz. Nowadays you cant overclock anything that high from stock speed.
 
I own a 5700XT and I'm going to say no. Cards that are the greatest of all time outlive their expected lifetime through innovative features, extreme value, or something that truly makes it stand out. The 5700XT really doesn't have any of these. It's biggest benefit was that it was available when Turning and Ampere weren't.

The 5700XT was a good, but not great card. I got a very good deal on my 5700XT at $330, but that was for the stock card with the very poorly designed blower cooler that looks like it has a dent. Even for blower coolers, it was bad. While the performance has improved over its lifetime, the fact that the drivers were so lackluster for so long such that it's only now that we are truly reaping the rewards of the purchase.

Additionally, it was missing features that keep it forward looking like Ray Tracing and some sort of DLSS equivalent. Video capture on it is not great, and it's performance in Adobe work leaves much to be desired. Had AMD blitzed the market for $300 with a better cooler, then it would be legendary. As it stand though, the card will be remembered a lot like the 6800GT, 7800GT, GTX 770, X800XL, RX480. Good cards, good value, but not legendary.

I would say that if the 5700XT had two of the following than it would be a different story: 12GB of memory, amazingly low power usage, some form of Ray Tracing, rock solid drivers from the start, or a $300ish price range.

As it stands, it doesn't have enough memory to drive it into the future beyond its life, it doesn't have performance to match even the new consoles once developers really start optimizing for them, it doesn't have low enough power usage to allow it to live on in the SFF market, its missing forward looking features, and unless you got those super Dell store deals when they were dumping the reference models, it was priced too high.

The 5700XT is a good card. It's just not one of the best of all time.
 
cdabc123 said:
So whats your vote for the greatest video card of all time?

Also this thread needs more polls
Click to expand...


Voodoo 2: this card was just, awesome.

Runner up: GeForce 256 DDR. It was ahead of its time and played games for years. I remember playing a lot of RTCW, and BF1942 on this.
 
Nope not even close. To me the 7970 was one of the best AMD card's.

A close 2nd place would be the 9700pro.
 
It look more than simply good only relative to Turing price to performance ratio that was all time "low" and for how long the replacements that should have made it obsolete a long time ago are taking to be purchasable, otherwise it would have been a normal amount of time relevant card (maybe even short in the long lived GPU, could have been less than a full year) for a new purchase at those price that brought absolutely nothing by itself.

But it that way a $400 launched late 2019 was on launch on some case performing under a Geforce 1080, a may 2016 $600 card, would it not been of Turing pricing, it would have been at the very most, OK.

It did age well driver/game support wise too, but under "normal" circumstance a 6700xt or 6700 should have made it look like a bad buy by now.

In term of classic/great, the new generation had often 100% type of leap.

In comparison to the :
Voodoo 2
Geforce 256 (there is a reason the Geforce name is still going strong)
Radeon 9700/9500 release
etc....

5700xt would be a short glip, a short gap maybe will be renowned for having launched RDNA, but not for itself.
 
Last edited:
I think it's a reasonable question; especially considering how low the expectations were for Navi going into launch. The 5700 XT has been a really excellent product and still punches well a year and a half later.
 
cdabc123 said:
So whats your vote for the greatest video card of all time?

Also this thread needs more polls
Click to expand...
yes to polls

pinning down the GOAT is so difficult! so many factors

but I'll keep bringing up the 8800GT/9800GT- even over 8800GTX/GTS (both G80 & G92 variants) G80 was a superb chip, the performance boost was immense and the switch to universal shader cores utterly changed the face of GPUs. Bringing in fully-programmable GPU compute was huuuuuuge. Thoroughly blew my mind at the time.

buuuut G92, and specifically 8800GT/9800GT gets my vote because it took that performance and made it available for 1/2 the price (flagship-level perf for ~$200!) and less power consumption. So good and affordable that they outlived the 200 series (including their own rebrand) and the 400 series, staying in retail until at least 2012- at which point they were still capable of gaming at comfortable settings. Truly a legend.
 
Stanley Pain said:
Everything/Everyone else in this thread is wrong.
Click to expand...
Disagree. The only thing better than a 9700 Pro was a 9500 Non-Pro that was flashed to a 9700 Non-Pro then overclocked to 9700 Pro levels.

Got a 9700 Pro for a 9500 Non-Pro price with little effort and some luck.
 
doubletake said:
Not even close. The 7970 (in all its iterations) was way more long-lived and compelling to purchase throughout its lifetime, seeing as how it competed favorably against Nv's mid to high-tier offerings for nearly 3 years, and offered more VRAM (not counting the limited 4GB 670/680/770s) and compute performance than Nv put into its consumer offerings, until the advent of the Titan.
Click to expand...
7970 vote here. Got 1.3GHz out of a 925MHz card on stock cooler. Next gen came around and it was still slightly faster lol! Absolute beast for its time, I will keep and remember that card for the rest of my life. I need to resurrect it..
 
I used to have 280X, I think that was a rebadge of the 7970 GHz Edition, and that was a solid card. Got lots of good gaming on that with a 720p projector.
 
5700 XT is/was a reasonable card for the time, mostly because it (somewhat) brought AMD back into the high-end, but it was just "good enough" in my view. It doesn't hold a candle to other cards I'd consider "best of all time": 9700pro, 8800 GTX/GTS/GT, GTX 1080 ti, 290/390, 680 GTX, 7970 (in that order).
 
Honestly, I think the 5700 (non-XT) was a better card. Easily flashed to the XT bios, you got unlocked power limits and 98% of the performance of the XT for sub-$300 at times. I got one for $290 with games!

I definitely should have held on to that card and sold it on fleabay for $600 now.
 
kirbyrj said:
Honestly, I think the 5700 (non-XT) was a better card. Easily flashed to the XT bios, you got unlocked power limits and 98% of the performance of the XT for sub-$300 at times. I got one for $290 with games!

I definitely should have held on to that card and sold it on fleabay for $600 now.
Click to expand...

I had to check eBay. HOLY CRAP you were not exagerating 😵
 
I'm thinking any video card that can actually be purchased is in the running.

But, GOAT? My 8800GTX and my GTX970 both gave me far more years of good (great?) service than I'd hoped for. Buy a card for a three-year life and still have it running for double (triple?) that time and it looks pretty damn good to me.
 
kirbyrj said:
Honestly, I think the 5700 (non-XT) was a better card. Easily flashed to the XT bios, you got unlocked power limits and 98% of the performance of the XT for sub-$300 at times. I got one for $290 with games!

I definitely should have held on to that card and sold it on fleabay for $600 now.
Click to expand...
This is an excellent point. I'd actually adjust my list to bump up those cards for which I could unlock shaders or flash for next-tier performance. The ones that come to mind: 6800 vanilla, GTX 465, 290 vanilla, RX560. Top-tier performance for hundreds less.
 
Due to the current market conditions, this card, the 5700 XT is what I use to game currently.
It has honestly held it's own at 1440p to my surprise.
It did replace a R290X which was a stout card as well.

Is it a GOAT like the GTX 8800 or 1080 Ti........no it is not.

I'd love a 6800XT but.......LoL
 
Pretty sure the 5700XT has already been overshadowed by both is predecessor and successor the RX 570/580 and the 6000 series cards. The RX cards offered (and still offer actually) basically the best value for 2-3 years at under $200. The 6000 series is the gen to finally (almost) compete with Nvidia's offerings at around the same price point at least. The 5700XT was never the best value or the best performer in any price bracket from what I've seen since it barely competed with the 2070/2070S 2 years after it launched and could be had for not much more with its extra features (RT/DLSS) included.
 
What is the criteria for greatest of all time when it comes to a video card?

Is it staying power? Cause if so the 290x is the clearly the goat
 
blackmomba said:
What is the criteria for greatest of all time when it comes to a video card?

Is it staying power? Cause if so the 290x is the clearly the goat
Click to expand...
I think the staying power would need to be adjusted for eras (speed of evolution, being the most popular cards for over 4 year's like the 1060 is less impressive than if a 1996 card would have done it)

- Staying power
- Performance and performance/ Dollar increase versus the predecessor and the direct competition of it's time
- Innovation that came with it, how different gaming got with it

On all those criteria, I am not sure how the 5700xt would score versus say a 1070/1080.
 
Last edited:
hesho said:
i still maintain the 9500 non pro is one of the greatest video cards of all time because it was able to be soft modded into a 9700. I think that video card was important because i found that is when i started looking at a bang for your buck ratio. To this day, i still follow that too.
Click to expand...
Man, I had that card! I remember building my SiL a rig for college, and she opted for the 9700 All-In-Wonder so she didn't have to buy a TV for her room. 19" LCD, Klipsch 5.1 sound...it was a nice rig.

Right now, I'd rank the RX 580 > 5700XT. Have both. The little card that could.
 
blackmomba said:
What is the criteria for greatest of all time when it comes to a video card?

Is it staying power? Cause if so the 290x is the clearly the goat
Click to expand...

I don't think I'd agree with that. If staying power were it, you'd have to go with something like the GeForce 8800GTX. It was at the very top of the performance heap for far longer than anything else I can think of. Sure, there was an 8800 Ultra, but it cost considerably more expensive and wasn't all that much faster. Most 8800GTX's could be overclocked to or past Ultra levels anyway. They could also be used for 3-Way SLI, etc. Back then, we actually got some scaling out of that in a few games. An 8800GTX SLI setup was also faster than the 9800GX2's that replaced them due to the wider memory bus. My 3-Way SLI 8800GTX setup was in fact faster than Quad-SLI'ed 9800GX2's most of the time. The 8800GTX was not only the top dog when it released, but remained a high end option and a good value for years beyond its release. When used in SLI, it often proved to be a better option than its immediate successors.

On the AMD side, I'd have to give it to the Radeon HD 7970, which was not only the fastest card when it released but proved to remain relevant in its rebranded form for years after its release. This is in spite of the issues I had with two of these in Crossfire and design limitations of the architecture I ran into with my particular setup. You can also make an argument for the Radeon 9700 Pro. The 290X? I just don't see it.
 
GTX 1080 from 2016 has 85% performance of 5700xt from 2019 where GTX 1080 uses ~184W and 5700XT ~227W and yet you wonder if 5700xt should be considered "the greatest of all time"
ARE YOU MAD? 🙄

This card was not even significantly cheaper than competition. It has the same price as RTX 2060 Super which has almost the same performance and in games which can take advantage of it eg. Cyberpunk 2077 (which also happen to be a game which need this extra frames per second...) it will look and play much worse in comparison.
So no, 5700xt is not one of the greatest. It is a card like GeForce MX440 or Radeon x800. For the time all of these seemed like not a bad proposition but within a year there were games which had missing effects here and there and over time more and more games looked worse, then looked broken because game devs were targetting new consoles so also new cards and there always came a day when games didn't run while they ran on cards which had the required features. In case of x800 it was exceptionally visible because of DX9 popularity for years. One could game on GeForce 6800 for more than a decade without worrying about anything other than performance. But wait, we have new console generation with new features just like then 🙃

As for greatest GPUs of all time then the answer is would be 3dfx Voodoo, GeForce 3, Radeon 9700 pro, GeForce 8800GTX 768MB and Radeon HD 5870.
Radeon HD 7970.... well, pretty much YES. It was pretty darn good GPU with all things it needed to have for its time and years to come in place. Heck 5700xt doesn't have single feaure more than these first GCN cards had 🤣. I had HD 7950 and it was went from 800MHz to 1100something MHz. It was crazy 😀
 
There's a lot of good, interesting comments here.

I think if you look at greatest as the most legendary then I agree most with the comments in favor of the 8800gt, 9700 pro, and one of the voodoo cards(not sure which). I might be a little biased since I owned the first two and wanted to get a voodoo for gaming but they just never met my other requirements.

With a more literal interpretation of greatest I'd swap out the 8800gt for the gtx/ultra since they came first and were slightly better in overall performance but I would consider the gt way more legendary.
 
Ebernanut said:
There's a lot of good, interesting comments here.

I think if you look at greatest as the most legendary then I agree most with the comments in favor of the 8800gt, 9700 pro, and one of the voodoo cards(not sure which). I might be a little biased since I owned the first two and wanted to get a voodoo for gaming but they just never met my other requirements.

With a more literal interpretation of greatest I'd swap out the 8800gt for the gtx/ultra since they came first and were slightly better in overall performance but I would consider the gt way more legendary.
Click to expand...
I think I still have an 8800GT with the original box. Fanless Arctic Accelero? cooler on it.
 
RX480! Spawned many tweaked rebadge versions. Plus they sold a megaton of them. I was a member of another tech forum and most of us on there were using them. Never seen that on a forum before. It was the right card at the right time. There hadn't been a really good priced mid-range 1080p card for a while.

Still using mine.
 
daglesj said:
RX480! Spawned many tweaked rebadge versions. Plus they sold a megaton of them. I was a member of another tech forum and most of us on there were using them. Never seen that on a forum before. It was the right card at the right time. There hadn't been a really good priced mid-range 1080p card for a while.

Still using mine.
Click to expand...
Maybe it was RX 480 thread? 🙃

GTX 1060 is very similar (time it came out, performance and price) card and so far it remains the most popular GPU on Steam GPU survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
Maybe it will even manage to be most popular GPU of all time? If anything it is 1060 that should be considered greatest GPU if it is choice of so many gamers... 🤣

Better contender for great value GPU of all times would be GTX 750Ti. It sold like hot cakes and ruled crappy PC builds and upgrades because unlike other cards they didn't require decent PSU. Is still in more computers than either RX 480 or 5700xt 🙂
 
coynatha said:
I think I still have an 8800GT with the original box. Fanless Arctic Accelero? cooler on it.
Click to expand...
I still have mine in the original box, a BFG OC model but it's just the reference design with that obnoxiously loud single slot cooler.
daglesj said:
RX480! Spawned many tweaked rebadge versions. Plus they sold a megaton of them. I was a member of another tech forum and most of us on there were using them. Never seen that on a forum before. It was the right card at the right time. There hadn't been a really good priced mid-range 1080p card for a while.

Still using mine.
Click to expand...
I had one and it was a decent card for a surprisingly long amount of time but it's not as notable(for gaming) as many of the other cards that have been mentioned. It might deserve an honorable mention for longevity but I think that mainly has to do with gpu tech stagnating a bit coupled with the fact that higher end cards were mainly used for running higher res while many people stayed on 1080p.

For both the 8800gt and the 9700pro you could go to any PC gaming forum when they were most popular and it seemed like the majority were running one, the 480 is fairly popular but nothing like them. The 400 series also only got rebranded once to the 500 series just like the g92 8000 series got rebranded to the 9000 series.
 
Another vote for the 1080 Ti

or

ATI Rage 128 Pro... Think that was the first Open GL supported card I owned, bringing out all the goodness in Quake.
 
Last edited:
No GOAT past 2015. They are too precise now. No fuck-ups that give us consumers free power.
The closer the big 2 R the less gifts they will give. You need some tanking for a card company to gift a card.
GF2-MX (16 MB fast RAM) for me. So highly OC'able and so cheap. Me and all my broke friends ran these.
2nd? 7970 for sure. The 3 GB and accomidating OC make it usable to this day if needed.
 
If your criteria for the best GPU are a) incremental performance increase, b) technological innovation, and c) longevity, it's between these three cards (probably in this order): 8800 GTX, 9700 Pro, and 1080 ti. There are other cards that may have excelled in one of those criteria, but not all three.

Overall, I think the 8800 GTX takes the prize: nearly twice the performance of prior gen, first mainstream unified shader architecture, and people were playing on it for 3-4 years after release (since both nV and ATI/AMD stagnated performance by releasing refreshes and rehashes of the same/similar chip design).
 
Last edited:
harmattan said:
If your criteria for the best GPU are a) incremental performance increase, b) technological innovation, and c) longevity, it's between these three cards (probably in this order): 8800 GTX, 9700 Pro, and 1080 ti. There are other cards that may have excelled in one of those criteria, but not all three.

Overall, I think the 8800 GTX takes the prize: nearly twice the performance of prior gen, first mainstream unified shader architecture, and people were playing on it for 3-4 years after release (since both nV and ATI/AMD stagnated performance by releasing refreshes and rehashes of the same/similar chip design).
Click to expand...
1080Ti? There was literally zero innovation compared to any other DX12 GPU

I would put RTX (Turing) cards instead.
Real time ray tracing is one of the biggest development since having shaders at all (Geforce 3) or having GPGPU capabilities (8800GTX) and "the holy grail of computer graphics".
And performance benefits brought by AI acceleration in form of DLSS outweigh anything we had before - also in DLSS 2.0 games not only have more fps but also look better (eg. Cyberpunk 2077). This is also significant for some types of AI training.
Sure, games need to take advantage of these features and users were not happy with RT reducing performance and Nvidia increasing prices but technically this is full fledged next generation GPU like they rarely come about and with this GPU Nvidia basically forced AMD to implement RT capabilities, also for (now) current generation of consoles. So Turing was definitely more important generation than Pascal ever was. Also Pascal had rather had typical performance improvement over previous generation and as far as longevity goes got outdated quite quickly. Radeon 7970 is far better GPU for longevity as i pretty much had all the newest features for few years straight... and especially given how long AMD actually optimized drivers for these GPU's making them never feel as artificially limited.
 
XoR_ said:
1080Ti? There was literally zero innovation compared to any other DX12 GPU

I would put RTX (Turing) cards instead.
Real time ray tracing is one of the biggest development since having shaders at all (Geforce 3) or having GPGPU capabilities (8800GTX) and "the holy grail of computer graphics".
And performance benefits brought by AI acceleration in form of DLSS outweigh anything we had before - also in DLSS 2.0 games not only have more fps but also look better (eg. Cyberpunk 2077). This is also significant for some types of AI training.
Sure, games need to take advantage of these features and users were not happy with RT reducing performance and Nvidia increasing prices but technically this is full fledged next generation GPU like they rarely come about and with this GPU Nvidia basically forced AMD to implement RT capabilities, also for (now) current generation of consoles. So Turing was definitely more important generation than Pascal ever was. Also Pascal had rather had typical performance improvement over previous generation and as far as longevity goes got outdated quite quickly. Radeon 7970 is far better GPU for longevity as i pretty much had all the newest features for few years straight... and especially given how long AMD actually optimized drivers for these GPU's making them never feel as artificially limited.
Click to expand...
Fair enough. I was considering throwing 2080 ti in my list for introducing RT in a real way, but 1) GTX 1080 ti has had longer staying power thus far, and 2) RT and DLSS has not brought real impact to gaming yet (where as unified shaders gave an immediate, massive bump in performance and affected all subsequent APIs). There's also the notable price increase on the 2080 ti which, disregarding my prior criteria, left a bad taste in many people's mouths and set a precedent for ever-increasing prices.
 
XoR_ said:
GTX 1080 from 2016 has 85% performance of 5700xt from 2019 where GTX 1080 uses ~184W and 5700XT ~227W and yet you wonder if 5700xt should be considered "the greatest of all time"
ARE YOU MAD? 🙄

This card was not even significantly cheaper than competition. It has the same price as RTX 2060 Super which has almost the same performance and in games which can take advantage of it eg. Cyberpunk 2077 (which also happen to be a game which need this extra frames per second...) it will look and play much worse in comparison.
So no, 5700xt is not one of the greatest. It is a card like GeForce MX440 or Radeon x800. For the time all of these seemed like not a bad proposition but within a year there were games which had missing effects here and there and over time more and more games looked worse, then looked broken because game devs were targetting new consoles so also new cards and there always came a day when games didn't run while they ran on cards which had the required features. In case of x800 it was exceptionally visible because of DX9 popularity for years. One could game on GeForce 6800 for more than a decade without worrying about anything other than performance. But wait, we have new console generation with new features just like then 🙃

As for greatest GPUs of all time then the answer is would be 3dfx Voodoo, GeForce 3, Radeon 9700 pro, GeForce 8800GTX 768MB and Radeon HD 5870.
Radeon HD 7970.... well, pretty much YES. It was pretty darn good GPU with all things it needed to have for its time and years to come in place. Heck 5700xt doesn't have single feaure more than these first GCN cards had 🤣. I had HD 7950 and it was went from 800MHz to 1100something MHz. It was crazy 😀
Click to expand...

lol

I agree the 5700xt is not in the running for the greatest of all time but I'm sorry this is not accurate at all. A 1080 is 75% of the 5700xt, whereas a 5700xt is 82% of the 3060ti. It's certainly closer to a 2080 than the 2060 super. For $399 it provided a very good value, arguably one of the better cards from the turing era (2018-2020) in terms of price/perf especially considering they were often available at the ~$350 range.
 

Attachments

  • 1440p-o.png
    1440p-o.png
    44.1 KB · Views: 0
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top