Video of the evolution of GPU processing power (1995 until today)

Nice one.

I remember most of those eras, and ATI/AMD were definitely rocking it from time to time.

Also, the 8800 was a HUGE leap when it came out. Damn.
 
Nice one.

I remember most of those eras, and ATI/AMD were definitely rocking it from time to time.

Also, the 8800 was a HUGE leap when it came out. Damn.

I skipped gaming from about the 1.4ghz tbird era until around the time those 8800gtx's came out.

Around then I bought a gaming laptop, because I just wanted to kinda dabble and I didn't know enough about the current gen desktops to get involved. One day I see an ad from a guy looking to trade a system with 16gb of ram, a core2quad and 2x8800gtx's for a gaming laptop because he was going to Afghanistan and wanted one. Those cards blew me away. I ended up doing stupid shit like Quake 2 and 3 timedemos lol. I didn't know what to even use it on at first! I still miss those cards. Ended up runing 3 way sli for a while.
 
Unfortunately GFLOPS lead didn't always translate into Gaming lead.
As mentioned in another thread, AMD cards often have had an advantage in raw compute power, but they don't have the backing in software to take advantage of it because it seems they always make architectures that go against industry trends. One could argue that NVIDIA carries a lot of influence currently with their dominant market position, which AMD needs to get there first before it can start dictating to the industry how 3D graphics and the hardware that drives it should evolve. I think one thing that happened with this lackluster low-level API trend, particularly asynchronous compute, is that AMD inadvertently showed how often their shader cores were idle during intense graphical workloads as opposed to NVIDIA's that were already running just about as efficiently as they could.
 
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