7 best GPUs of all time

erek

erek

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They missed the RV770 / ATI Radeon HD 4850 / 4870 Pro which could be had on [H]ard|Forums @ Launch for $169. I know because i bought one from someone on this very forum. Best GPU of all time in terms of price and performance.

"The dystopian future of GPUs
Nvidia opened Pandora's box in 2018 when it launched the RTX 20 series. It introduced an era of GPUs with four digit price tags, GPUs that didn't bring meaningful performance improvements, and GPUs that only really stand out when using new technologies of sometimes dubious value. For a brief moment in 2020, we all thought that maybe Nvidia and AMD were about to inject some much-needed energy into the market, but it's become clear that neither company wants to turn back the clock.

In 2023, Nvidia has a flagship that costs more than a midrange PC, a midrange card that got canceled a month before launch due to consumer fury, and mobile GPUs that have terrible names. Meanwhile, AMD is winning in the sub-$300 segment literally only because Nvidia hasn't competed there since 2019 and its own flagship GPU is well behind Nvidia's. It's just a disaster no matter how you look at it and as long as these two companies hold the keys to PC gaming, you'll have to pay them whatever they deem fit."

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Source: https://www.xda-developers.com/best-gpus-all-time/
 
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ATi's 4000 and 5000 series rocked. The later pushing market leading tech. Loved it. Then $$ and the switch. Came back with the 7000 series that started slow upon GCN 1.0 but are still generally capable due to the forward looking arc depending on usage. Nvidias competing cards of this era are long left in the bin of useless.
 
HD 7970 scaled for way longer than it had any reason to. If people knew how their card will perform two years down the line the 680's wouldn't sell nearly as much as they did. Great card, I had an ASUS Matrix 7970 back when they actually made decent AMD cards.
 
Radeon 9700 - Agree, R300 was a legendary GPU and the NV competition with GeForce FX was meme-worthy levels of bad

GeForce 8800- Agree, huge leap in performance, remained relevant for a LONG time and the shift to unified fully-programmable shader cores fundamentally changed GPUs as we know them

Radeon 5970- Mixed feelings... It did mark pretty much the high-water point of multi-GPU relevancy but idk, from that era I feel like Radeon 6850 / 6950 got more people excited and stayed relevant in the secondhand market for longer. Also Radeon 7850... A bit later but lasted a really long time.

Radeon 290X- Agree, I guess, given the framing as it being the last time in the 2010s that AMD was unquestionably competitive in high-end gaming GPUs. They did make very compelling second-hand cards for a long time and AFAIK can still playably run any current game, albeit with settings turned way down.

GeForce 1080- Agree, very highly-regarded, great performance and efficiency, plentiful and still relevant in used market. However 1080Ti could also go in that spot for the same reasons.

GeForce 3080- HARD DISAGREE. Sure it brought huge gainz over 2080, but any discussion about "great deal" or "costing the same as 2080" or "$700" or "MSRP" is laughable for a 3000-series card. Truth is more like "a lucky few won out and managed to get a $700 3080 while everyone else paid $1000-$1500". Plus 10GB VRAM is not very nice for a card that fast going into the 2020s with new consoles and game engines raising the gfx bar.

Radeon 6800XT- slightly disagree, it was never that great of a deal IRL despite being a highly-regarded GPU. I think 6900XT would be more apt choice for the list given its symbolism of AMD finally once again competing with Nvidia's top-end. 6900XT has also latterly become a nice mid-range option with the deep price cuts since the end of last summer.
 
Here I am, still rocking my 980Ti. Surprisingly I can play Battlefield 4 under Linux at 4k and the frame rates are in the 90-120 fps region, which is fine considering I have a 60Hz monitor. As long as I can play on my fav Battlefield 4 servers I'm happy, although I'm sure Nvidia will drop support of my venerable 980Ti soon enough, so I may be forced to upgrade.

At least I got my money's worth from a card that cost me $1200.00 brand new.
 
NattyKathy said:
GeForce 3080- HARD DISAGREE. Sure it brought huge gainz over 2080, but any discussion about "great deal" or "costing the same as 2080" or "$700" or "MSRP" is laughable for a 3000-series card. Truth is more like "a lucky few won out and managed to get a $700 3080 while everyone else paid $1000-$1500".
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If the 8800 or the 9700pro was released in during an unprecedent lockdown and the biggest mining boom, their prices would have been sky high too. What I mean is that it seems unfair to judge any GPU released during the mining boom and lockdown based on the inflated prices caused by both events. At, or near, MSRP the 3080 was a fantastic card. But, despite that, I do agree with you, I don't think it's one of the top 7 GPUs of all time.
 
mkppo said:
HD 7970 scaled for way longer than it had any reason to. If people knew how their card will perform two years down the line the 680's wouldn't sell nearly as much as they did. Great card, I had an ASUS Matrix 7970 back when they actually made decent AMD cards.
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The 7970 was great, eventually. Remember, it released at a stupid high price of $550, nearly a $200 price increase on the 6970. It was slower than the 680( a mid range card), which launched two months later at $499. AMD had to go back and up the clocks(the Ghz) and reduce the price. However, even then it was a toss up to which card was better. Finally in November, 10 months after release, AMD released their performance driver. That put the 7970 way out in front.

It would have been one of the greatest cards ever, if they had to have it right from the start and at a $450 price tag. Which is why I would be reluctant to put it as one of the top 7 cards of all time.
 
My 7 best GPUs would be the following.

One of the early Riva TNT/TNT 2. They were all so good at that time. Picking one would be nearly impossible.
9700 Pro. No contest really.
8800GT, again, I don't think anyone will argue with this :)

It gets a lot harder to pick after this.
4850/4870 Fantastic performance at a fantastic price.
Rx 290/x Really good card. A very under rated card and much better longevity than even the 7970.
GTX 970. What an amazing card, despite the misleading specs.
GTX 1080Ti. Another fantastic performer and only a little more expensive than the 1080 launch price.

So many cards came close, the HD 6950 with unlockable shaders, the GTX 1060 6GB, the RTX 3080, the 6700XT, The 7970.
 
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Up until I got my RTX 4090, I regarded the 8800 GTX as the Best GPU of all Time. The 8800 GTX was such a massive leap forward that it made everything that came before it feel like ancient tech. It was an unbelievably fast GPU that was completely over powered for games that were on the market at the time (sans Crysis).

The reason I say "up until I got my RTX 4090" is because the RTX 4090 is giving me the same vibes. It's a massive leap forward in performance, so far in fact that my 4K120hz OLED seems to be the limiting factor in most games I play. That's insane to me. The 4090 is just nutso powerful.
 
madpistol said:
Up until I got my RTX 4090, I regarded the 8800 GTX as the Best GPU of all Time. The 8800 GTX was such a massive leap forward that it made everything that came before it feel like ancient tech. It was an unbelievably fast GPU that was completely over powered for games that were on the market at the time (sans Crysis).

The reason I say "up until I got my RTX 4090" is because the RTX 4090 is giving me the same vibes. It's a massive leap forward in performance, so far in fact that my 4K120hz OLED seems to be the limiting factor in most games I play. That's insane to me. The 4090 is just nutso powerful.
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you try letting it breath a lil bit by upping or maxxing out the Power Limit slider yet, bud?

Hook it up

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erek said:
a midrange card that got canceled a month before launch due to consumer fury,
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I know this is semantics but calling the 3080 as a "midrange" card should quickly be followed by hitting yourself in the head with a tack hammer, not too much mind you just one good swipe to make you remember just because there's a super high end "HALO" card available doesn't make what used to be "enthusiast level" cards as "midrange"
 
sfsuphysics said:
I know this is semantics but calling the 3080 as a "midrange" card should quickly be followed by hitting yourself in the head with a tack hammer, not too much mind you just one good swipe to make you remember just because there's a super high end "HALO" card available doesn't make what used to be "enthusiast level" cards as "midrange"
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Have to agree here. The RTX 3080 was a cut down GA102, the flagship core of the lineup. It was definitely a high-end GPU... it just wasn't a very good one. The 10GB VRAM was a limitation pretty quickly, and the power usage meant it wasn't a super efficient card either. Still, the performance was solid, just not earth-shattering.
 
my favorite video cards were my voodoo3, geforce 4 ti 4800 (i think thats what it was), and my 1080 (that i am still gaming decently well on).
 
madpistol said:
Have to agree here. The RTX 3080 was a cut down GA102, the flagship core of the lineup. It was definitely a high-end GPU... it just wasn't a very good one. The 10GB VRAM was a limitation pretty quickly, and the power usage meant it wasn't a super efficient card either. Still, the performance was solid, just not earth-shattering.
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The "midrange" card is actually about the 4080 12gb, which was a renamed 4070ti (which is "midrange"), but then got cancelled and reverted back into, you guessed it, the 4070ti.
 
madpistol said:
Up until I got my RTX 4090, I regarded the 8800 GTX as the Best GPU of all Time. The 8800 GTX was such a massive leap forward that it made everything that came before it feel like ancient tech. It was an unbelievably fast GPU that was completely over powered for games that were on the market at the time (sans Crysis).

The reason I say "up until I got my RTX 4090" is because the RTX 4090 is giving me the same vibes. It's a massive leap forward in performance, so far in fact that my 4K120hz OLED seems to be the limiting factor in most games I play. That's insane to me. The 4090 is just nutso powerful.
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If you had 144 it would bring it down to earth more. I'm playing Arkham Origins which is years old and at 4k 144 everything maxed it's amazingly pressing my 4090 hard up to 70%-80% GPU usage. I was sad cause like you I wanted it to be more of a powerhouse but there is going to be games that crush it lol
 
erek said:
I also saw a list today of nVidia’s biggest failures without mentioning the NV30 U

Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/biggest-nvidia-fails-all-time/

—

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LOL

They mention the GTX 480 as being the worst GPU NVIDIA has ever launched, yeah, not hardly compared to the FX series.
The GTX 480 did run hot with a then-large 250 watt TDP, but compared to today's GPUs that isn't even a midrange TDP.

I used to use a GTX 480 back in the early 2010s and after replacing the stock cooler with a 3rd party cooler, it was a good GPU throughout its life for games and GPGPU tasks.
The article reads like it was written by a gen z who can't remember anything pre-2010, and it shows their complete ignorance to the subject and the past.
 
Red Falcon said:
LOL

They mention the GTX 480 as being the worst GPU NVIDIA has ever launched, yeah, not hardly compared to the FX series.
The GTX 480 did run hot with a then-large 250 watt TDP, but compared to today's GPUs that isn't even a midrange TDP.

I used to use a GTX 480 back in the early 2010s and after replacing the stock cooler with a 3rd party cooler, it was a good GPU throughout its life for games and GPGPU tasks.
The article reads like it was written by a gen z who can't remember anything pre-2010, and it shows their complete ignorance to the subject and the past.
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FX and NV1
 
I did not thought that 3dfx would be 100% left out of that those type of ranking.

Not that it is unfair and the legacy of the Voodoo 2 is for example probably quite exaggerated in hindsight (of how close the competition was timewise) versus how different 6 month of hardware change felt in the 90s when cpu often got 15% faster and giant gpu gen change were 8-12 months, etc..

It is not an easy debate-ranking because of how fast it changed, a bit like comparing a Ford T, New Beatles, 1996 Accord and a Testla. Specially now that AMD-Nvidia got so good to follow each other, how do you get to be particularly good, a bit why it can look strange to have a 6800xt-3080 upthere, has they were so close and existing at the same time, that make them look a bit like the norm, versus when the 9700pro ended up being such the better pick than the competition at launch.
 
Everybody wants their own card on this list, so there is no pleasing everybody. I'd rather do my own list of my personal top 5 cards that I owned:

5 - 5850 - lasted me a long time in a very competitive era
4 - 9800PRO - 9700PRO? What's that?
3 - Geforce 2 GTS - Blew everything out of the water.
2 - 290X - 4K gaming in 2014 here we go. Who cares about power, slap a water block on that puppy.
1 - 660GTX SLI - Still drinking the 680 Ultra owners tears that came from smashing their records in every conceivable benchmark.

Also here is my top 5 worst gpus list:

5 - Riva 128 - OK performance, awful image quality
4 - 9600XT - I wanted to play far cry, not watch a slideshow of it.
3 - 5770 - not what I expected
2 - 7600GS - scamvidia, I didn't fall for the Geforce 2 MX or the Geforce 4 MX I fell for this one.
1 - 290X crossfire - Enable crossfire? -50% FPS for you with awful frame pacing and stuttering. There wasn't a single game were it actually worked well.
 
NattyKathy said:
Radeon 9700 - Agree, R300 was a legendary GPU and the NV competition with GeForce FX was meme-worthy levels of bad

GeForce 8800- Agree, huge leap in performance, remained relevant for a LONG time and the shift to unified fully-programmable shader cores fundamentally changed GPUs as we know them

Radeon 5970- Mixed feelings... It did mark pretty much the high-water point of multi-GPU relevancy but idk, from that era I feel like Radeon 6850 / 6950 got more people excited and stayed relevant in the secondhand market for longer. Also Radeon 7850... A bit later but lasted a really long time.

Radeon 290X- Agree, I guess, given the framing as it being the last time in the 2010s that AMD was unquestionably competitive in high-end gaming GPUs. They did make very compelling second-hand cards for a long time and AFAIK can still playably run any current game, albeit with settings turned way down.

GeForce 1080- Agree, very highly-regarded, great performance and efficiency, plentiful and still relevant in used market. However 1080Ti could also go in that spot for the same reasons.

GeForce 3080- HARD DISAGREE. Sure it brought huge gainz over 2080, but any discussion about "great deal" or "costing the same as 2080" or "$700" or "MSRP" is laughable for a 3000-series card. Truth is more like "a lucky few won out and managed to get a $700 3080 while everyone else paid $1000-$1500". Plus 10GB VRAM is not very nice for a card that fast going into the 2020s with new consoles and game engines raising the gfx bar.

Radeon 6800XT- slightly disagree, it was never that great of a deal IRL despite being a highly-regarded GPU. I think 6900XT would be more apt choice for the list given its symbolism of AMD finally once again competing with Nvidia's top-end. 6900XT has also latterly become a nice mid-range option with the deep price cuts since the end of last summer.
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I mostly agree with you. 9700 yes, 8800 of course, 1080 yep. The rest, meh. Older GPUs were a way bigger deal. For sure one of the Voodoo cards and probably a Geforce 1 2 or 3. Those were massive leaps in short periods of time. Make it a top 5 instead of a weirdo top 7.
 
M76 said:
Everybody wants their own card on this list, so there is no pleasing everybody. I'd rather do my own list of my personal top 5 cards that I owned:

5 - 5850 - lasted me a long time in a very competitive era
4 - 9800PRO - 9700PRO? What's that?
3 - Geforce 2 GTS - Blew everything out of the water.
2 - 290X - 4K gaming in 2014 here we go. Who cares about power, slap a water block on that puppy.
1 - 660GTX SLI - Still drinking the 680 Ultra owners tears that came from smashing their records in every conceivable benchmark.

Also here is my top 5 worst gpus list:

5 - Riva 128 - OK performance, awful image quality
4 - 9600XT - I wanted to play far cry, not watch a slideshow of it.
3 - 5770 - not what I expected
2 - 7600GS - scamvidia, I didn't fall for the Geforce 2 MX or the Geforce 4 MX I fell for this one.
1 - 290X crossfire - Enable crossfire? -50% FPS for you with awful frame pacing and stuttering. There wasn't a single game were it actually worked well.
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Yeah man the 290X was an absolute beast. No idea why they launched it with a terrible af cooler but that's AMD for you especially back in the days. I put it on water at launch and it was the best GPU I owned and approaching it's 10th anniversary. It was the best balanced GCN architecture among the lot and was a great overclocker to boot. The 7970 and 8800GTX were also great and come pretty close to the 290X for me. Voodoo 3 2000 would also be right up there, that first time glide feeling :p
Seriously, the 290X competes with a gtx 980 stock for stock a few years later and the 980 wasn't even the generation it was supposed to compete against (it was initially a 780 competitor, not even 780 ti). They just didn't have the resources at the time and were struggling but that GCN arch was great. If it wasn't, they would have never gotten away with not really releasing any real successor for so so long.
Worst was the FX series. I spent an extra $150 or something over the 9700 pro and bought the FX before reviews were out, never again did I do that. I saw the pictures before release though and immediately thought "wow, coolers are so much bigger and cooler looking than the 9700 pro it must be faster plus it's launching many months after the 9700 pro". What a joke, it consumed a lot more power and was slower than the 9700 pro in games
 
When I upgraded from a Ti4800 to a 6600GT half way through HL2 and saw the improvement going from DX8 to DX9...That was my blown away moment.
 
Yeah it's kinda sad that even with 40% generational uplifts in recent years the IQ doesn't really change much. RT does little to nothing as well in most games. I think my last blown away moment was when I first ran Crysis and wanted a GPU upgrade. But it still pales in comparison to what I experienced when I first launched quake 2 with an upgrade from the Nvidia Riva TNT to Voodoo 3 2000. I mean, that was night and day and that insane uplift absolutely transformed IQ. Those were the days
 
My first "blown away" moment was seeing the difference between a Geforce 2 MX and a Geforce 3 Ti 500.
 
Tengis said:
My first "blown away" moment was seeing the difference between a Geforce 2 MX and a Geforce 3 Ti 500.
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My first "blown away" moment was going from a Celeron 1.3Ghz CPU with Intel Integrated graphics to a Geforce 2 MX 400. I was playing a game called from "Emperor: Battle for Dune".

With the Intel graphics, I was only able to play at medium settings 800x600 and get a decent framerate.
With the Geforce 2 MX 400, I was able to max out the game at 1024x768, and the framerate was blazing fast.

The difference literally changed my life. I bought that Geforce 2 MX 400 for $80 hoping that it might help performance a little bit. Instead, it completely transformed the experience.
 
I gotta throw GF2 MX in the mix. I know not an obvious choice and not my #1, but I feel, with the few posts above, that lill'bugger needs some respect! Of course I'm talking about the good ol' Sd RAM model at full bus and not the many, many garbage cost cutting versions that were released after. Has there ever been more versions of a card ever made then a GF2-MX?
Was it a world beater? No way, but it was a great bang for the buck card that OC'ed crazy well. I'm guessing because SDR was so mature and DDR so new that if you were willing to tweak the room was there to pull close with what was big $$ cards.
I lived in a house of 20 somethings who were all broke and poor like myself (the house OC expert) and we all rocked our lowly cards clocked to the sky for $100'ish bucks!
Maybe the only card I actually modded. No shroud in those days, so I think I put, Artic Silver glue paste and shoved a CPU cooler on there! Still have that bugger in a drawer.
 
M76 said:
Everybody wants their own card on this list, so there is no pleasing everybody. I'd rather do my own list of my personal top 5 cards that I owned:

1 - 660GTX SLI - Still drinking the 680 Ultra owners tears that came from smashing their records in every conceivable benchmark.

Also here is my top 5 worst gpus list:

5 - Riva 128 - OK performance, awful image quality
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I don't know about everyone wanting their own cards on the list. I didn't own the 9700Pro or the 8800GT or the GTX 970. There are some cards like the 8800GT and 9700 Pro that should be on any objective list of top GPUs.

About the 660 GTX in SLI. Why would 680 owners be crying salty tears because the sli setup using lower end gpus was faster and cheaper? Was this not always the case? The GTX 460 was much faster than the GTX 480 for example. And what is the GTX 680 Ultra?

Oh, and thanks, I did forget about the Riva 128's poor image quality. Have edited my list to remove that card.
 
I went from an overclocked Voodoo 3 3000 to an overclocked Geforce 2 GTS, Quake 3 Arena time demo was blazing under the Geforce 2 GTS compared to the Voodoo 3.
 
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Definitely Oblivion (HDR instead of Bloom) and Maybe “Doom 3 & Quake IV” were the only supposed “blowout” gaming times I’ve had in terms of PC Gaming so that would serve to indicate the desktop GeForce 6800 GT and for mobile the GeForce Go 7800 Ultra (G70 M — delivered full desktop performance)
 
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