alt Hacker NewsEvery GPU That Mattered
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Awwww..., this brings so many memories. I had almost all of the early ones: Voodoo 2, Riva TNT2, then GeForce 3 (I think...). Then I switched to laptops and didn't have a discrete graphics till last year when I started playing with LLMs locally. So basically I jumped from GeForce 3 to RTX 3090 :) Thank you for bringing those memories back!
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!).
There's no horizontal scroll bar, apparently I need to click and drag the GPU section leftwards with the mouse. (Am I old now?)
This is a wonderful-looking infographic, but I truly don't think there are 49 GPUs that mattered in the PC gaming hardware space - let alone all of computer graphics. Call it recency bias, but after the Pascal cards it feels like maybe one or two more entrants actually mattered?
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.
I have a strong feeling that this website was designed by Claude Code using the /frontend-design skill.
Matrox needs a mention somewhere. GPUs do raster too, and theirs optimized for an entirely different market.
That mattered on the PC evolution, it misses many others e.g TMS34010.
Well my 9070 XT made the list; I've been quite happy with it, great performance with paying the Nvidia tax.
RIP my Radeon 7500 from high school though, that was always a budget card, and we all had them but wanted the 9700. Couldn't beat the box are from that era though: https://www.ebay.com/itm/206159283550
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
Missing the Radeon RX Vega 64!
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.
I had the Voodoo 1 with VGA passthrough from the 2D card. When you loaded a game you'd head a little clunk from a relay on the Voodoo taking over the VGA signal and you knew you were about to have a good time. Doesn't seem that long ago!
I'd be really interested to see SGI on this chart. When did consumer hardware exceed what you could do on an SGI box?
I think Sun and HP had some 3d capabilities, but it was mostly aimed at engineering/CAD
I wouldn't call a card like the 5080 important. It was incremental compared to the previous generation, a poor value for money, and was awkwardly placed - being very cut down compared to the 90 class of that generation - significantly more than earlier generations.
Rx580 is on there, but not the R9 290. I’m not sure where the Rx500 series actually pushed technology forward. They always seemed like the AMD budget line. And if 580 is important, why not the 590 or the 570?
Few of the “pre-GPU” graphics accelerators that seem to have mattered are here. The ViRGE. The Mach32 and Mach64. The Trident cards, like the TGUI9440. Yet the Voodoo often isn’t considered a GPU and is on the list.
Did anyone else notice the decline of graphics on the GPU's coolers! I missed that classic box artwork too!
Missing the Rage Fury Maxx, finest welding job by the boffins at ATI, severely hampered by software support.
I don't understand this - where's Trident VGA?
To this day I still use RX580 (8GB version) on Linux. This card is really underrated.
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.
I don't see my first GPU on there, it was the humble GeForce4 MX440. It could run almost any game I cared about for a surprisingly long time, even if it's not a true modern card. These days almost all my machines are on iGPUs baked into the CPU. There's way less fun for me, but they are a lot more compact at least.
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.
Not including the Diamond Monster Fusion, the first 2D/3D card, is a glaring omission.
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.
The 9400 GT mattered to me as it was my first gpu. Had bought NFS Carbon only to find that the home pc only had a CD drive not DVD lol, so finally with that drive upgrade also came the 9400 GT and fun ensued.
I remember Voodoo - precisely because I didn't have it back then, as it was a luxury option.
Cant seem to load the page, is it down? can’t establish a connection to the server at sheets.works
nit: The 9070XT is listed as $599 but that price essentially never existed. I was lucky to get one for $730.
I remember having the Voodoo card to play Thief: The Dark Project. It felt incredible at the time.
S3 Trio, Matrix Millennium
Wow I stopped following hardware releases after the GeForce 2 and that was in 2004?
not a very good list, from a historical perspective it’s missing many important cards, as mentioned by others
also, the gpu did not exist until 1999
looks like this was created for engagement
I know sheets.works was made with an agent, however, still good taste on the design.
Surprised PUBG was the defining game for so many. I don’t recall it being a demanding one.
"Hey, I wonder what they'll say about SGI Impact."
Oh well.
My GPU is there! Rocking my 980ti since 2015.
My old GTX770 sitting in a drawer somewhere appreciates this post.
Missed the Voodoo 5 5000 which laid the ground work for nvlink
Interesting! Through the times
Terrible list that should not list almost anything released in the last 10 years. We do live in a very dark and longlasting gpu era.
This is such a cool visualization. Thanks for creating it!
The title of site should probably have "for gaming" at the end as it doesn't consider GPUs for compute such as the A100 or the GTX 580 3GB that AlexNet was trained on.
I was so sad when I retired my 1060 6GB. That thing served me well for almost a decade.
I don't believe this list was curated as the title suggests. It's just a semi-random list of popular-ish GPUs with LLM-generated descriptions.
The site looks nice, which fools us into thinking thought and effort was put into this.