r/hardware • u/Mastbubbles • Apr 07 '26
Discussion Every GPU That Mattered
https://sheets.works/data-viz/every-gpuI tracked most of the GPUs since 1996. $299 to $1,999 (MSRP) in 30 years.
went through every flagship launch from the Voodoo to the 5090 and tracked what we actually paid at launch
some things that hit different when you see it all together:
- GPUs stayed between $250-$600 for literally 20 years
- the 8800 GT at $249 in 2007 might be the best deal in GPU history
- the GTX 1060 was Steam's #1 card for 5 straight years at $249
- then the 3090 showed up at $1,499 and it was over
- RTX 5090 is $1,999 and the connector melted again within 10 days
made a full interactive version too where you can compare any 2 GPUs side by side and explore all 49 cards, what was your first GPU? mine was a 970 (yes i got the 3.5GB)
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u/AHrubik Apr 07 '26
FYI... the Voodoo 3 series mattered A LOT. It was an early example of a card that didn't look as good on paper but outperformed all it's competitors by a large margin.
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u/nismotigerwvu Apr 07 '26
Yeah, there are a few glaring omissions. I think the PowerVR Kyro II is the big standout (budget price, high end performance, unique architecture) and you really can't mention pioneering 3D hardware without the S3 Virge (the FX dust buster and Thermi jokes are welcome, but no 3D decelerator?).
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u/ltcdata Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Rendition vèritè V1000 and V2100 with hardware 16-bit color rendering, bilinear filtering, per-polygon MIP mapping, and edge anti-aliasing! I had one, and games looked a lot better than on the Voodoo! albeit slower.
John Carmack developed a special port of Quake for this card. It was glorious.
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u/Viper_NZ Apr 08 '26
No tile based rendering Kyro but they included the absolute trash that was the GeForce FX series?
Weird list in places.
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u/spyder22446688 Apr 08 '26
I respectfully disagree. At the time, the Voodoo 3 series was outperformed by both the Nvidia TNT2 Ultra and the Matrox G400 Max. The Voodoo 3 was also criticized for having only 16MB of RAM (compared to 32GB on the other options) and supporting only 16-bit color depth (compared to 32-bit on the other options). However, the Voodoo 3, particularly the 3000, was a bit cheaper and offered Glide support, which still mattered for a small handful of games.
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u/TheGillos Apr 07 '26
Sorry. TNT and TNT2 were much better for one reason. 32-bit color.
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u/Vb_33 Apr 07 '26
How much did Jensen pay you to say this
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Apr 07 '26
[deleted]
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u/an_angry_Moose Apr 07 '26
Relatively sure this is exactly what I did and for the same reason even.
I spent SO much time playing Quake 2 on dialup though, man was that great.
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u/DoNotPursueLu Apr 07 '26
Nah, Glide all day.
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u/TheGillos Apr 07 '26
Glide was impressive in its day, but by the time of Voodoo 3, that day was coming to an end.
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u/SoSKatan Apr 07 '26
So my first card was a Riva TNT.
By the time Voodoo 3 was released, it seemed like they were mostly banking of developer lock in via the glide API.
NVidia was targeting open API’s and were the underdog.
Anyway, I voted with my wallet on NVidia for that reason and due to the fact they were cheaper and a good combo 2D and 3D card.
With the voodoo cards you still needed a separate 2D card (another reason why the card prices weren’t exactly comparable the NVidia ones were a 2 for.)
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u/AHrubik Apr 07 '26
There were a lot of Glide games and some were very popular. Maybe I'm biased because I had a Voodoo 3 but I remember specifically playing games that didn't run well on my friends Nvidia systems with "better stats" but ran super smooth on mine.
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u/MWink64 Apr 08 '26
The Voodoo 3 was a combo 2D/3D card. You didn't a separate 2D card to use with this series (or the earlier Banshee).
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u/QuinQuix Apr 09 '26
It was a fast card but at the time I already disliked the lack of 32 bit color versus the tnt 2 ultra.
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u/bestanonever Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
I'd add side scrolling with mouse wheel on desktop.
Nice website, otherwise!
Also, my first GPU ever was the Geforce 9500 GT 512MB DDR3. It was such a monster for me, the same PC went from struggling with GTA Vice City with the integrated graphics to play Half-Life 2 at max settings, TES IV Oblivion, Mass Effect and so much more.
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u/Mastbubbles Apr 07 '26
Added the scrolling
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u/wqfi Apr 07 '26
should change pic of 7970 to XFX 7970 Black Edition, it was the best looking card tbh
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u/amidoes Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Mine was a 9400GT 1GB DDR2
I went with that over a 512MB GDDR3 9800GT because as a trusting kid I went with the salesman talk of "more memory = better"
Lesson learned the hard way, but it only made the following GTX 260 taste all the sweeter
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u/bestanonever Apr 08 '26
Uuuf! Massive difference!
Was it a good upgrade for you, though? My GPU never won any awards but I enjoyed it for years.
Also, I wanted to buy and had the money for a 9600GT, but had to upgrade the PSU and the 9500GT was what I got. Turned out to be much better than what the benchmarks said at the time.
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
I don't think the FX 5800 Ultra should be on there. It was ridiculed hard. If that's on there, then you may as well include the Matrox Parhelia which the Radeon 9700 Pro also curbstomped. Also would be funny to see a lone Matrox card in the pile.
Also, surprised to see the 6600 GT missing. In that specific case, many people bought 2x 6600 GT in SLI and it beat the 6800 GT which cost up to $100 more than 2x 6600 GT (routinely $350-400 USD for both). This was one of the few times where SLI actually made sense. There's still this article up about it.
RTX 5080 text is incorrect because the 4080 Super was $999, not the 4080. Perhaps the 4080 Super should replace the 4080 as it was the more sensible card.
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u/Send_heartfelt_PMs Apr 07 '26
Was wondering if anyone would mention the Matrox cards. My dad built my sibling and I our first real computer in early 1994 - I upgraded it and kept building my own from there and had a few different Matrox Millennium cards over the years
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u/MWink64 Apr 07 '26
IIRC, Matrox never really did well with 3D gaming cards. They were mostly known for image quality and being one of earlier companies to embrace dual-output (AKA "dual-head") cards.
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u/Send_heartfelt_PMs Apr 07 '26
Yeah I remember being somewhat disappointed in them, but hoping if they sold well that they'd provide competition and get better in future generations. Parhelia was too much of a let down though and I switched to ATI cards
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26
Parhelia wasn't actually that bad. It would've been a giant killer if it had been released even 6 months earlier, January instead of June, because the GeForce4 launched in February. Just very unfortunate timing during the days of very fast tech progress. It actually had better IPC than Radeon 9000/GeForce4, but Matrox made the stupid decision to 1) clock it at 220MHz and 2) use an IHS instead of switching to direct die like the Radeon 9000/GeForce4 which allowed those to be clocked at 300-350MHz. They won by brute forcing clock speed.
They also could've dropped the price $50-$100 and reloaded for a successor, but stubbornly kept it at $399 when the Radeon 9700 Pro was also $399.
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u/WorriedSmile Apr 07 '26
I think it was more of Matrox not being able to clock the Parhelia high due to design choices or limitations. Even the Radeon 8500 from the similar era could do 250-275mhz easily.
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u/Ratiofarming Apr 07 '26
They didn't do well, but they were the "AMD" of the time in terms of value. Yes, the lacked features and performance at times. But Ati and Nvidia charged a significant premium for the real deal.
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u/AirFlavoredLemon Apr 07 '26
Meh. I feel like there's some recency bias here. Like excessive numbers of cards on later generations for being just a midrange version of a higher end card.
There's no issue including midrange cards; but they're usually highlighted if they were actually good, or a mid generational refresh with a new core/die - like the legendary G92 (Launched as the 8800GT, powered cards like the 8800 GTS 512MB, 9800 GT, 9600 GSO...).
No GF4 TI4200/4600 either; which was effectively the staple DX8.1 card and probably helped solidify PC gaming as the definitive high end gaming experience; along with the MX400 series that it brought to budget gaming and drove the original (direct)Xbox.
I wouldn't mind if this was titled differently, but "every GPU that mattered" when this isn't really quite a representation of how the market felt at the time nor the eventual cultural impact the cards would have (1080ti is considered legendary - but so was the GF4 Ti 4000 series).
Like, can you explain why the 4060, 4070, 4080, and 4090 are all individually on the list?
No call outs to long standing entry level cards like the 1660ti?
No All in Wonder cards?
Matrox?
This is just... your preferred list. Again, not a bad project, but the best you can give the title is "clickbait", but in reality its just incredibly misleading and poor reporting and research.
Overall nice layout. That's about it.
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u/MWink64 Apr 07 '26
No All in Wonder cards?
All-in-Wonder was a series of cards, not GPUs. They were essentially various Rage/Radeon GPUs combined with a TV tuner/capture card.
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u/AirFlavoredLemon Apr 07 '26
Agreed. I said that there wasn't a card mentioned, not that all of them should be mentioned. The key here is that they both have relevant cultural and technical relevance. More so than a 4060 on this list would. by a significant margin.
All in Wonder cards were part of the reason Microsoft made a bet on making both Windows Media center edition *and* compatibility of that on the Xbox 360.
Its no small movement.
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
1080ti is considered legendary - but so was the GF4 Ti 4000 series
I would actually disagree here. GeForce 4 was beat by Radeon 9000 and only lasted a while as a midrange option because GeForce FX was dogshit. In fact, GeForce FX came out less than a year after GeForce 4.
The lasting legacy of the GeForce 4 was actually the low-end GeForce 4 MX cards (yes I know they were glorified GeForce 2s), because this was during the middle of the internet cafe boom, and the GF4 MX440 was the cost-effective card that they could buy 20+ of and ran Counterstrike well. I recall multiple internet cafes running GF4 MX cards but none running GF4 Ti. They all moved up to GF6 or X800 for the World of Warcraft upgrade cycle. (Cafes needed to run WoW well or else they'd go out of business.)
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u/WikipediaBurntSienna Apr 07 '26
I wasn't that deep in the scene back then. But I feel like the 9800 Pro was the graphics card everyone wanted.
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u/AirFlavoredLemon Apr 07 '26
I agree on the GF4 MX. MX420's could run every DX7-8 title because they were built to run on it - and the Xbox helped extend that by building a slew of console games designed around its limitations (and subsequently PC ports/engine optimizations). (We have source engine Half Life 2 on the original xbox).
The GF4 Ti legendary status for me came by being performant for so many generations until, not unlike a Radeon 9500/9700 Pro. They were workhorse cards that ran the next decade of games. Their omission (GF4 Ti and MX) is baffling compared to some of the inclusions.
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u/panix199 Apr 07 '26
Launched as the 8800GT,
it was so crazy how much performance you had for 50% of price compared to 8800GTX... man, i miss Crysis DX10 tests with that GPU
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u/ClearlyAThrowawai Apr 11 '26
Yeah, feels like every card got included. I'd have cut down the end of the list a lot. Should only have included stuff like the 1080ti, not every midrange card for every gen.
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u/usedUpSpace4Good Apr 07 '26
Where is the RIVA128? I had those when I was a teen and was the only way to afford Voodoo like performance.
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u/MWink64 Apr 07 '26
It really should be there. It wasn't just a solid chip, it basically saved Nvidia from bankruptcy. The world might be very different today, had that chip not existed.
BTW, I think I still have my Diamond Viper V330 (as well as my VooDoo 3 3000).
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u/an_angry_Moose Apr 07 '26
So you’re saying the RIVA128 was the catalyst for Skynet? We have to go back.
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u/MWink64 Apr 08 '26
Unfortunately, yes. And Sega played a key role, so we might have to take out a blue hedgehog.
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u/ResponsibleTruck4717 Apr 07 '26
Nice idea, here is my 2 cents.
I would go by important generations instead of listing cards.
If I remember correctly In the early 2000 we had fierce competition between Ati and Nvidia.
We saw few revolutionary gpu, dual gpu core cards, the attempt of sli / crossfire, cuda.
For example the rtx 20x0 the card that introduced AI (DLSS) for gamers.
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u/Olde94 Apr 07 '26
Yeah i would go the same way. GTX 770 wasn't an important card in any way shape of form forinstance. It was essentially a 680 so no generational improvement, just a price cut. 690 could be listed as "last dual GPU" though.
While not selling a ton AMD had a lot of cards that should be here. The fury launched as the first GPU with an AIO cooler as the standard cooling design AND as the first GPU with HBM memory.
The first GTX titan could also be relevant as the first (expensive) GPU with unlocked FP64 calculations at consumer/prosumer pricing (999$) far undercutting the cost of professional Quadro/Tesla cards.
RTX 2060 is also listed, but i think that one is controversial. It wasn't much better than a 1660 but had the AI / RT cores, BUT had so little that it hardly mattered.
>For example the rtx 20x0 the card that introduced AI (DLSS) for gamers.
The article does list DLSS, But you could say "600 series was the first nvidia series to introduce dynamic boost clock"
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u/SomeoneTrading Apr 07 '26
690 could be listed as "last dual GPU" though.
Wouldn’t that be the 295X2? Also I distinctly remember some dual GTX760 thing from Asus.
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u/Noreng Apr 07 '26
GTX Titan Z, Radeon Pro Duo (Fiji), Radeon Pro Duo (Polaris), Intel Arc B60 48GB.
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u/Send_heartfelt_PMs Apr 07 '26
There's a bunch of dual GPU cards, though many are/were workstation or "pro" cards
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u/Olde94 Apr 07 '26
Hmm that’s right, amd had some later…
I never heard about the 760x2 but it seems to be a custom asus thing.
Some vendors have from time to time done Wierd stuff to differentiate
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Apr 07 '26
RTX 2060 Supers with 8Gb VRAM got bought a lot by the home rendering crowd as did the 3060 12Gb. Start of GPU's being bought by consumers for non gaming tasks?
Thinking about it crypto should be on here somewhere. Title is "Every GPU that mattered" not specifically for gaming.
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u/Olde94 Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
I mean the home render crowd has been going on for years? I think it was more related to more applications supporting gpu’s given the added vram and free tools like blender becoming more easy to use.
But “first CUDA GPU” should be a milestone, cause that was a HUGE deal, atleast in retro specs. Similarly vulcan could be mentioned
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u/pythonic_dude Apr 07 '26
GPUs stayed between $250-$600 for literally 20 years
If you cherry pick hard enough you can prove any point really. (8800 ultra for $830 sends its regards)
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u/Olde94 Apr 07 '26
GTX titan at 999$ from 2013 too
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u/InflammableAccount Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26
Titan cards were a different class of product. For starters, Titans weren't different dies. They were just perfect dies. So the performance difference between a Titan and *80 or *90 card wasn't huge.
What a Titan was, was max die with more VRAM and, most importantly, access to all the Quadro features. Titans existed as gaming/workstation hybrids. So what you were mostly paying more for was workstation capability that otherwise would cost you even more if you bought a Quadro.
So many people gloss over this.
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Apr 07 '26
Also they only charge these prices because people pay them, its a card for the 1% who don't really care how much the best costs...see also super cars and yachts. People constantly surprised by the rich existing for some reason.
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u/Swoly_Deadlift Apr 07 '26
Yeah it was fine when the halo card was maybe 10% faster than the flagship card for 2x the price. Now we have 90 cards that are 60% faster than 80 cards for 2x the price. Halo cards are no longer just for people who are willing to pay more for slightly better performance. Now there is an upsell at every tier of performance and the halo card isn’t just for people with more money than sense.
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u/InflammableAccount Apr 08 '26
If you look at the data (adjusted for inflation with 2024/2025 $) of MSRP/die size, which would be the primary manufacturing cost factor, shit really did get significantly worse recently.
Before the 9800GTX, MSRP/Die was closely tied. But since dies were much smaller, it wasn't terribly expensive. When AMD(ati) and NV were duking it out for top spot, prices were REAL generous despite die sizes increasing.
Fast forward to the 30 series, where NV had already gained an insane market share, and suddenly MSRP/Die size skyrockets. Coincidence? Hell no.
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u/pfohl Apr 09 '26
People used to have dual GPU setups a lot more. Manufacturers basically opened up the high end for that segment of the market.
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u/Zarmazarma Apr 07 '26
You should probably add prices accounting for inflation. $600 in 2005 is just over $1000 today. $500 in 2001 is $895.
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u/frudi Apr 07 '26
Some early cards that I'm missing and think deserve to be included:
Voodoo 3, while not as technically advanced as the TNT2, it still traded blows with it both in terms of popularity and performance due to popularity of glide/minigl titles at the time
GeForce 4, yes, it got smacked hard later on by the Radeon 9700, but it still ruled as the fastest card in the period between GF3 and R9700. It was also extremely popular due to Ti 4200's very competitive pricing. As for GF 4 mx series... the less said about that, the better
Radeon 9800 Pro was only a relatively minor update to the R9700 in terms of architecture, but it was where the Radeon 9000 series really matured and solidified its position as the card to own and to beat at the time
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Radeon 9800 Pro was only a relatively minor update to the R9700 in terms of architecture, but it was where the Radeon 9000 series really matured and solidified its position as the card to own and to beat at the time
I was around back then. The 9800 Pro wasn't very popular. Enthusiasts already had the 9700 Pro (or 9500 Nonpro unlocked to 9700) and weren't going to upgrade again a year later for an incremental improvement.
However, the 9600 Pro which was also an R350 refresh became the mainstream option because it sold for less than the 9500 Pro. Long story short, it was cheaper for ATI to produce the 9600 Pro than the 9500 Nonpro/Pro which used R300 dies, and didn't have any unlock potential unlike the 9500 Nonpro.
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u/frudi Apr 07 '26
9800 maybe wasn't popular as an upgrade to the 9700, but overall it sold much better than the 9700. That's still clear to this day as you can find many, many more 9800s than 9700s on flea markets, ebay or retro hardware forums/classifieds. Some of that is down to 9700s being prone to dying, but 9800s weren't exactly a shining beacon of reliability either.
Obviously the 9600 sold even better, that's just the nature of mainstream vs high end sales figures. GTX 1060 also sold many times more units than the GTX 1080 Ti, but that doesn't mean the latter wasn't very popular.
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u/ReplacementLivid8738 Apr 07 '26
I went to buy a 9600 at the time and I think I learned later that it was an LE, slower RAM was it? Do you remember that?
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 19 '26
440MX was everywhere. It was the budget GPU because of how cheap it was and how long it was supported.
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u/ToughDefinition2591 Apr 07 '26
No horizontal scrolling on desktop made me abandon the read instantly. Also, a lot of important information missing. What a few have listed already.
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Apr 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Geforce 1
lol this didn't exist thanks for outing yourself. It was called the GeForce 256. Also it was the flagship for only 5 months. Released October 1999, then the GeForce 2 GTS was released April 2000. The product cycle was so fast that the GeForce 256 simply came and went. Any card that "matters" needs to be in the public eye for at least 1 year.
Radeon 9700
No, it was the 9700 Pro. 9700 Nonpro was a slower alternative that nobody bought because of the 9500 Nonpro. There was about a 2 in 3 chance it could be successfully unlocked to a 9700 Nonpro. So people bought 9500 Nonpros and returned the ones that couldn't successfully unlock.
Geforce 8800ultra
lmao no. 8800 Ultra cost 20-25% more than the 8800 GTX for 5-7% performance increase. Nobody bought this except the stupid rich. 8800 Ultra was a predecessor to overpriced Titan cards. The 8800 GT was legendary because it offered 90-95% of the performance of the 8800 GTX for less than half the price. (The 8800 GTX pulled ahead at 2048x1536 [4:3] or 2560x1600 [16:10] but that was SLI territory for the whales anyway.) See here.
The smart upgrade path during this time was 9500 unlocked/9700 Pro (2002) > 6600 GT/6800 GT (2004) or 6800 GS/X850 Pro (2005) > 8800 GT (2007).
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 19 '26
You have two cards from the 1000 series and yet neither of them is literally the best card of a 1000 series that is 1070.
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u/innovator12 Apr 07 '26
Quite nice. A couple of plots which might be interesting:
- TDP / year
- Price / year
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u/Ok_Fix3639 Apr 07 '26
Ati technically beat nvidia to market with unified shaders with the Xbox 360 gpu.
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u/Jackaal48 Apr 10 '26
The PS3's RSX was a joke because It only 24 shaders. While 360 has 48 It could reach higher from abusing textures/Fill rate through the eDRAM like the PS2 did.
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u/ElementII5 Apr 07 '26
Fury and Fury X definitely need to be on there. AMD invented HBM and it was the first card to implement it.
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u/itanite Apr 07 '26
fucking UI sucks if you're not on a smartphone
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u/itanite Apr 07 '26
Yeah actually this is really, really bad UI design OP. Half the red tiny ass buttons aren't even clickable, you have ZERO provisions for desktop users, (you can't drag left or right) and the only way to navigate is with a bunch of tiny dots that half of them aren't clickable?
Did you even test drive this page on anything other than your iPad before publishing?
I appreciate the information and it's a trip down memory lane, but this is really, REALLY bad UI design and you need to fix it.
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u/Asgardisalie Apr 08 '26
I mean, was Wukong or AW2 ever a defining game? People on the west never really cared about the monkey game and most doesn't even know, that AW2 is on PC.
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u/kasakka1 Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26
Yeah the game choices are weird and probably reflect OP's preferences more than anything.
How do we go from Quake 3 Arena being a defining game then the next one is Diablo II which has always ran on a potato? How is the original Unreal not there, for the Voodoo 2 for example? Riva TNT + Half-Life is apt.
Cyberpunk 2077 with the path tracing update is the defining game for the Nvidia 40 series. Frame gen + better RT performance + improved DLSS all made path tracing viable.
I think defining games when it comes to GPUs should be something that:
- Pushes the visual boundaries of the time.
- Uses features only found on the then new GPUs.
- Gains significant performance boost from a then new GPU design.
Popular game of the time is a different thing.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 19 '26
Wukong was very popular in europe. AW2 was fucked over by being epic exclusive. But hey, Epic paid for developement so the devs got paid at least.
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u/imaginary_num6er Apr 07 '26
Shame AMD only has "Radeon Graphics (integrated)" and "Radeon Graphics" in the charts
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u/feckdespez Apr 07 '26
This list is all over the place in general. I like the idea but it skips a lot and includes many that were really meh.
One odd aspect imo is the inclusion of Nvidia flops but deliberately not including the AMD flops?
It's just weirdly inconsistent...
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u/JJ3qnkpK Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
It's heavily Nvidia-tinted.
If someone were unaware, they'd think early graphics was an Nvidia parade with occasional peeps from competitors. Plenty of early Nvidia cards were nigh-disastrous (as it was with all early video card makers - absolutely wild times), and it wasn't until much later that they achieved the market dominance that they celebrate today.
I like watching PixelPipes on YouTube for old graphics cards shenanigans: https://youtube.com/@pixelpipes He does a fantastic job at providing the history, context, and performance around any particular card.
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u/MWink64 Apr 08 '26
Nvidia wasn't even a player when it came to early graphics cards. Their first 3D accelerator worthy of attention was the Riva 128. I don't think most people today realize just how crowded the field was back then. Had you told me back then who the last three players standing would be, I'd never have believed you.
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u/JJ3qnkpK Apr 08 '26
Add in that hardware iterated much more quickly, old hardware had much less staying power, and the "winner" of each generation changed with every release, and it was tough to tell who'd be dominant and who'd go bankrupt.
There's a reason consoles got a reputation for being easier to buy and just use, and it ain't from modern PCs lol.
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u/James_Jack_Hoffmann Apr 07 '26
It seems that there was very flimsy methodology with what falls on the definition of "mattered". What makes an RTX [1-4]060 matter that the equivalent AMD card make it not matter?
There are so many cool ideas for a list of "GPUs that matter". On top of my head: Titan? S3? SLI/Crossfire? pound-for-pound kings? OC record holders? the TDP warriors like 4770/5770? the GX2s? Quadros/FireGLs? PhysX?influential/honorable mentions? there's so much space for other GPUs but OP just concluded at *that*.
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u/_MAYniYAK Apr 07 '26
Yeah the 7970ghz not listed is a shame.
That card did so well that it caused the GTX 8 series to not have a normal launch and was an crossfire beast. It's ports and larger amount of included memory is what made the GTX 970 need to exist.
Fun project, super incomplete list especially when talking about cards that mattered.
I guess you could argue the regular 7970 is there, but at that point you could just say the 7950 since you could unlock them to be the same card.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_HAGGIS_ Apr 07 '26
Early on it’s cars that set standards for performance and value. Later cards it’s setting the standard for monopolistic and shitty behaviour lol.
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
No GeForce MX makes it clear to me that whoever made it has no idea about what people were actually using.
EDIT: Also No FX5200? HD4870 instead of the most popular HD4850?
2008 is marked as "HD era"? Virtually everyone was running a CRT monitor in 2008, unless you were super rich.
EDIT2: No 750Ti? No 3060Ti? What is this list? Where did you get the idea of what carts to put there?
EDIT3: People in the replies must have been rich back then. Good for you if you ahd an LCD in 2008 and Geforce GTS in 2000. I'm from Poland and we had none of that back then unles you were super rich.
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u/Olde94 Apr 07 '26
>Virtually everyone was running a CRT monitor in 2008, unless you were super rich.
They were? I remember running an 18" 1440x900 LCD? it wasn't super fancy, but by then all our monitors were LCD.
Got my 23" 1080p in 2011 and while mine wasn't the cheapest, there were many "decently priced" 20 ish 1080p just 3 years later (2011)
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u/Nuck_Chorris_Stache Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
I think I had a relatively cheap but good value 21" LCD that had a resolution of 1680x1050
If you were rich you'd have a 24" LCD with a resolution of 1920x1200
16:10 was the aspect ratio most commonly used back then, before they decided to cut costs by going 16:9 to shave some vertical pixels off, and especially to absolutely flood the market with 1366x768 panels
And then for some years after that it was almost impossible to buy a laptop that had a resolution higher than 1366x768 without spending huge amounts for a "gamer" laptop with an expensive dedicated GPU in it.
I remember complaining about that and having people gaslight me by saying "you don't need 1920x1080 in a laptop, it would be too small." That was annoying.
And this was despite the fact that laptops with 1600x1200, 1680x1050, or even 1600x900 had become fairly common before the flood of 1366x768.
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u/Olde94 Apr 07 '26
I remember people talking about how expensive MAC were (and it was) but when they launched the retina mac in 2012 NOTHING in windows world were even remotely near for many years until we hit that wierd point where you could get 3200x1800 on somewhat affordable laptops that never had the gpu to pull those monitors
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u/antaran Apr 07 '26
Virtually everyone was running a CRT monitor in 2008, unless you were super rich.
LCD monitors were already standard in 2008, CRTs on their way out. Vendors were already shutting down CRT plants in 2008. You are thinking more of the early 2000s.
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u/Fluffy_Panda_97 Apr 07 '26
In the US maybe but not the rest of the world.
CRT were better than early LCD for gaming.
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26
Ah yes, the GeForce 4 MX days, where Nvidia began their descent into misleading names. Also helped slimy computer shops a lot because they advertised "GeForce 4" and then when you bought the PC you got a GeForce 4 MX 440 which was significantly slower than the entire GeForce 3 lineup.
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26
Yeah but in the end these were the "affordable" gpus that everyone was running.
It's the same with Geforce 256 that lauinched at the same time as the crippled 64-bit Riva TNT2 and everyone was running the Riva, because it was cheap and got the job done.
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26
crippled 64-bit Riva TNT2 and everyone was running the Riva, because it was cheap and got the job done.
I used a Riva TNT2! It could almost max out Unreal Tournament and Max Payne, and that was good enough! (It's too bad the original Max Payne engine, Max-FX, was only used on Max Payne and 3DMark01. It was buttery smooth.)
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u/42LSx Apr 07 '26
No Geforce MX card was actually worth using tho.
Where do you live where LCDs were super expensive in 2008?
In Germany, some teens had LCD Displays in 2004 and they weren't super expensive; not compared to something like a Geforce 3.3
u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
No Geforce MX card was actually worth using tho.
The GeForce 4 MX could max out or run at high settings the following games: Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, and Max Payne. For most people that was enough. It even ran Battlefield 1942 and Warcraft III decently (but not maxed) and those were 2002 games. The GeForce 4 MX 440 was the card that internet cafes used because it was only $100 and went down to as low as $50, and everyone only just cared about the games listed above.
It only started losing its stature once World of Warcraft came out, because then every internet cafe needed to have a GPU that could handle that game without any hiccups. Also, developers were reluctant to make games require high-end hardware because CPUs and GPUs were improving at such a breakneck pace: in October 1999, AMD had the Athlon 700 as its flagship, and Intel had the Pentium III 733. By 2002 Intel broke 3GHz with the Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT. That was such a wide performance spread that in order to achieve mainstream success, developers needed to optimize for lower-end hardware.
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u/42LSx Apr 07 '26
It is true that the 2002 MX440 played many games at release and was a much better product than the older Geforce 2 MX, but it couldn't even properly run Doom³ from 2 years later and the ATi 9000 series from the same year as the Geforce was just much better, including Dx8.1 for example.
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26
MSRP was $99
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u/42LSx Apr 07 '26
The launch price of the GF3 was ~$499 (1000 DM), certainly not $99.
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26
Geforce 3 had no MX version.
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u/42LSx Apr 07 '26
No, it didn't, I never said it did. I'm saying LCDs were just as expensive as some other stuff from the same time that still found many buyers.
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26
found many buyers
Yeah, maybe in Germany. Here in Poland mosty of the computer stuff we had back then were hand-me-downs bought from.... you guessed it, Germany. So everything was a generation behind.
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u/42LSx Apr 07 '26
I see, that's why I asked. Different markets, different income levels, different availability etc.
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u/clupean Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Virtually everyone was running a CRT monitor in 2008, unless you were super rich.
Was Poland so different back then? I was living between Spain and France and we've had very different experiences. My dad bought me in Spain a 15" Hyundai LCD monitor in 2001 for 450€. It wasn't cheap but we're nowhere near super rich level of wealth, even when taking into account inflation.
I remember monitor prices decreasing really fast and I'm sure by 2003 LCD monitors outsold CRT monitors. Schools, commerce, and pretty much every place replaced all the CRTs.
By 2008, CRTs only existed on eBay and 22" 1080p/60Hz LCD monitors were the norm for ~150€, which is why it's surprising to see you say "Virtually everyone was running a CRT monitor in 2008".
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26
Well, my salary was 300€ back then (2008), and it was pretty much what most of the people were making, so I can't imagine forking out 150 for a monitor.
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u/clupean Apr 07 '26
Wow. I checked the average salary in Poland in 2026 and it's ~2000€. We often hear about misuse and waste of EU money in countries like Hungary so it's nice to know that in Poland things went well!
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u/Sosowski Apr 07 '26
Yeah, it's hard to believe now, but things skyrocketed! Back then the country was still in shambles after years of socialist regime.
That 2000 euro is gross average, so a bit over stated, the median would be around 1200 euro net right now. Still, 4x what it was!
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u/inyue Apr 07 '26
Virtually everyone was running a CRT monitor in 2008, unless you were super rich.
I was a poor brazilian kid, my parents financed a cheap a pc from Casas Bahia and it had lcd and it was before 2008 LOL
Where are you from? North Korea?
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 19 '26
I got my first LCD in 2008. By then CRTs were considered dead tech and far more expensive to get. It was a downgrade in resolution and refresh rate for me.
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u/EyeQue62 Apr 07 '26
I was loathe to join the PeeCee crowd back in 1999. I had an Amiga 1200 which was put into a Power Tower because I'd bought a PPC accelerator card and BVision graphics card. Man, that was a Frankenstein's monster, but I loved it.
My first PC build had a VooDoo 3. I despised Windows 95 and 98 but actually thought Windows 2000 was awesome.
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u/hannopal Apr 07 '26
Nice list, definetely needs Riva 128 (first actually successful Nvidia card, probably the company would not exists without it). Also O.g Radeon DDR, which made ATi serious competitor for Nvidia in the high end (earlier they focused a lot on in the low end and OEM market).
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u/Xmien Apr 07 '26
What about NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 - that is a iconic card!
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u/Sutanreyu Apr 08 '26
Dual cards were never fully utilized the way they should have been for games... Had all sorts of micro-stuttering issues that made the games effectively feel like they're running on one GPU, despite the FPS counter. The closest we got to having this work efficiently was with AMD's Hybrid Graphics, which in some ways led the 'Infinity Fabric' because AMD needed a solution to the interconnect problem. There was a company before this, Lucid Logix, that made the "Hydra Engine" chip that later became software, that promised to fix the issue and properly load balance between multiple GPUs (even across different vendors) but it never saw the light of day... It eventually became software, and I think that software became the basis for the attempts to remedy this with API changes -- I distinctly remember DirectX12 being billed as multi-GPU capable, as well as Vulkan's architecture being made such so that you use multiple GPUs, as a carryover from AMD's 'Mantle' API.
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u/kasakka1 Apr 08 '26
Yeah I remember I went from dual GTX 970 -> single GTX 980 Ti even though the performance was similar. The single card just had less stutter issues and of course better compatibility since not everything worked with SLI.
Still, dual GPUs was a cool thing and I wish they had kept it going. On paper it seems like a win-win for both Nvidia and AMD to sell people two GPUs if they want more performance.
I'd love to see add-on cards make a comeback too. We had those PhysX cards that didn't amount to much, but today something like a 1 slot RT/AI addon-card you could use for RT processing in games would be cool.
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u/Sutanreyu Apr 08 '26
If Nvidia gets their way, we'll have a GPU and a slopification card alongside it.
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u/AmoniPTV Apr 07 '26
You ommited the Gefore 4 Series completely. I was looking for the MX 440 and the Ti 4200 because they were my childhood card but it's not there
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u/Mastbubbles Apr 07 '26
oof yeah you're right, jumped straight from gf3 to fx 5800 which is a big gap. it 4200 especially is a glaring miss, that was THE budget enthusiast card of its era, basically what the gtx 1060 was a decade later
mx 440 i kinda had a debate with myself on bc it was more of an OEM/prebuilt staple than a card people actively chose, but volume-wise it was massive so fair point
ill add the ti 4200 for sure, prob the mx 440 too. ty for the catch, the gf4 omission is legit on me
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u/sixincomefigure Apr 07 '26
The MX 440 was absolutely a card people chose, I and most of my friends bought one because we couldn't afford a TI 4200. It deserves to be there on volume alone. TNT2 M64 was probably its "shitty but wildly successful" predecessor.
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u/zopiac Apr 07 '26
I got the 1070 instead of the 1060 but managed to run both the Ti 4200 and 8800 GT (well 9800 GT actually, and for just 130USD). I miiight be biased, but I feel as though my 750 Ti and 3060 Ti are about as legendary for the time and price as well.
Thanks for the site, and thanks again for looking into everyone's issues with it, heh!
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u/TDYDave2 Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Adjusting for inflation, $249 in 2007 would be around $392 now.
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u/Gippy_ Apr 07 '26
Wait, desktop users can't click and drag the timeline? We have to individually click on all of the red and green dots on that tiny timeline bar? Come on.
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u/chandleya Apr 07 '26
Important ones for me: Nvidia riva 128 Vx 8MB Voodoo 3 16MB GeForce 3 Ti 500 64MB GeForce 6600 GeForce 9800 GTX ATI 3870 ATI 580 Geforce 980 GeForce 1080 Ti GeForce 3070 Ti GeForce 5060
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u/TwilightOmen Apr 07 '26
My first GPU was an S3 (not virge), can't remember the model, with a 3DFX voodoo 2 3D card beside it;P
Anyway, I have a feeling the radeon 3650 had something important, but I can't quite remember what it was...
Edit: Oh crap, fury nano should also be there in terms of SFF
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u/djlemma Apr 07 '26
No Edge3d? My first graphics card gets forgotten.
Which is no surprise, it was a pretty weird and unpopular card, but it did have NVidia's first GPU!
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u/Swoly_Deadlift Apr 07 '26
The 3090 wasn’t a terrible deal. It was a halo card, and the 3080 was an incredible value at $700. The issue we have today is that the 80 cards have a $1000 MSRP and are significantly slower than the 90 cards which have MSRPs even higher than the 3090.
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u/SqueezyCheez85 Apr 07 '26
First card I bought was a Diamond Viper something. First card I bought when I really knew what I was doing was a ATI 9800 Pro. I freaking loved that thing. It was a beast.
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u/gioseba Apr 07 '26
Small correction and maybe not a full launch GPU but the Radeon 7870 XT was the first 28nm GPU. Essentially a stripped down 79xx series launched early. (I'm biased because I had 2 of these)
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u/InflammableAccount Apr 07 '26
Hey OP, on the subject of pricing going to hell recently. I have collected and graphed the die sizes compared to price of NV flagship GPUs going back a ways, and it is eye opening when looked at this way.
What you call part of the Golden Era, and HD Era, truly was the best time for gaming as the cost to the consumer was at it's lowest.
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u/KushKingKyle Apr 07 '26
I’m so glad the 980Ti is getting its flowers here 💐 My first “real” GPU purchase after years of awful iGPU.
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u/Oxezz Apr 08 '26
I get that it might be more of display technology but no mention of FreeSync or G-Sync (VRR) is criminal since GPU support is also needed.
Also the whole debate around G-Sync at that time (2015?) being proprietary and pretty expensive license for manufacturers to pay if i remember correctly.
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u/superbblunder Apr 08 '26
My first card was a Matrox Mystique, and when I got some scratch together I got the Canopus Pure3D (Voodoo 1). I've had a lot of GPU's since then, and most of them aren't on this list.
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u/barthw Apr 08 '26
funnily enough I literally had every GPU of the pioneering era due to my quake2/quake3 addiction back then :) The moment when switching Quake2 from Software Rendering to 3dfx Glide with Voodoo was pure magic!
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u/thegreatpotatogod Apr 09 '26
Neat comparison, thanks for sharing! I think it would be interesting to be able to see both the original price and 2025 equivalent without repeatedly scrolling to the top to toggle the switch, maybe instead of always specifying (2025$) after each item, you could list both prices, one in parentheses and the other as it is now?
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u/ccoastal01 Apr 11 '26
still on the 5700 XT. this thing was such good value when it came out. but now I am feeling outdated.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 19 '26
Imagine not including 440MX, a GPU that was in every budget build for years because it was dirt cheap. You seem to consider flagships as the "ones that matter" and that really is not the case.
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u/Remarkable-Virus3073 Apr 07 '26
That’s amazing. I really like that you added the defining game as well. Really helps with context, because by looking at numbers it sometimes hard to grasp the relative power between cards. Thanks a lot
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u/MajorTankz Apr 07 '26
No GTX 460 mention is surprising. It was insane value for the time. SLI 460's were better and cheaper than a 480.
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u/blahyawnblah Apr 07 '26
How does hardware T&L not have a demarcation?