Every GPU That Mattered

arjie

Absolute nostalgia fever. About a month ago, I dug up an old desktop in the corner, took the drives out and gave away the machine. It felt like putting a racehorse to pasture: i7-4790k, 1080 Ti. It was my dream machine when I got it. Dual-boot (as we did back in the old days when Proton wasn't here) to Ubuntu, then Elementary, then Arch. By the time I gave it away it wasn't worth the power cost. And that brought to mind my older dream machine, an 8800 GT from generations past, before which we made do with a Via Unichrome that worked sufficiently enough on the OpenChrome driver that I could edit open software (Freespace only needed a few constants changed) so it would render (though some of the image was smeared and so on I could play!).

0x70dd

This brings so many memories. I remember how badly I wanted an GeForce 6800 Sadly, I was never able to justify spending this much money on a GPU. Still holds true, even today.

sakex

Gaming GPUs only which are those we are all nostalgic about, but hardly the ones that matter now for Nvidia.

charcircuit

Why didn't datacenter GPUs make the list. AI trained with them is such a significant part of computing today.

pjmlp

That mattered on the PC evolution, it misses many others e.g TMS34010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

bob1029

The 8800 GT is easily the most impactful GPU in my mind. The combination of that video card with valve's Orange Box was insane value proposition at the time. I'd put the 5700xt at #2 for being the longest lived GPU I've owned by a very wide margin. It's still in use today.

Zealotux

Ah I was just trying to remember the model names last week and this website pops up like magic, weird how the internet works sometimes. The 560 Ti was a dream for teenage me and most of my friends back then, but I must say my Radeon HD 4870 game powered most of my favourite Team Fortress 2 years.

__alexs

A lot of GPUs in this list are basically just previous GPU but faster or more RAM. I kind of thought it was going to focus on interesting new architecture innovations.

paavohtl

I think pairing RX 5700 XT with Control as the "defining game" is an interesting choice, considering the facts 1. AMD cards were incapable of RT at the time and 2. Control was basically the first game with a good, comprehensive RT implementation that had a massive positive impact on the graphics.

cubefox

> We build visual stories like this for companies Combined with the color scheme of this site, this might be a cleverly disguised Nvidia ad. Edit: Clicking through to their main page [1]: yeah, that's definitely an Nvidia ad. 1: https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire

Xenoamorphous

Oh, my beloved TNT2 Ultra.

vman81

Honorable mention, the Rendition Vérité 1000 https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/index.html Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.

tetris11

I really want to see TDP over time. If I can at least tell myself that our technological achievements come with efficiency gains instead of just apeing power throughput, I can rest a little better

BoredPositron

Missed the Voodoo 5 5000 which laid the ground work for nvlink

Tepix

Missing the Radeon RX Vega 64!

nickel0800

This is such a cool visualization. Thanks for creating it!

dist-epoch

I think it's a terrible UI - requires 3 different things to see the GPUS: scrolling vertically down to see the Era buttons which then scrolls up and hides the Era buttons even if you have enough vertical screen space, clicking on the Era buttons, clicking < > buttons to see the GPUs of an Era. I can't remember last time I've seen such a confused design.

mrweasel

It's probably just me being out of touch, but I don't think the GeForce RTX 4000 or 5000 series really mattered/matters that much. At the same time I'd add the S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200. Both mattered a lot at the time, but not long term.

finaard

I have fond memories of lending a Voodoo 2 from a friend when I was moving from a 486 to a K6 based system component by component. At that time I was still using my old ISA VGA card, which meant 2D performance was horrible, and I couldn't really watch videos on that thing - but thanks to the Voodoo I could play Unreal Tournament without problems.

kawsper

We had the Riva TNT2 in our family computer, so that was fun to see that again, I think it was paired with an AMD K6-2 chip. One day one of my friends from school wanted to optimize airflow in our computer, and re-did the cabling, but he managed to block the CPU-fan from spinning. I am not sure how, but we didn't realise it for a couple of months. When I got my own PC, it had an AMD Barton chip, and it allowed me to play Half-Life 2.