The 23 Greatest Graphics Cards Of All Time

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Wow, the world don't begin with the PC /at mid 90s/.
Ever heard something about Reality engine for example?
Or you should at least mention somewhere it's about PC graphich cards exclusively.
 
[citation][nom]pepe2907[/nom]Wow, the world don't begin with the PC /at mid 90s/.Ever heard something about Reality engine for example?Or you should at least mention somewhere it's about PC graphich cards exclusively.[/citation]

The RealityEngine was marketed to and used by large organizations such as companies and universities that are involved in computer simulation, digital content creation, engineering and research.
Click to expand...

Though not specifically stated, this article I'm sure refers to the retail market, as far as graphics cards are concerned.
 
[citation][nom]silverblue[/nom]Amusingly, the forum thread for this article concerns the 23 greatest, whilst the article itself mentions 22. In any case, this list is of the performance leaders throughout the past 15 years, not the most popular nor the best designed. Don't make my mistake and wish for something to go in there that doesn't belong... otherwise Cookie Monster will go to town on yo ass (or something).http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WhuikFY1Pg[/citation]


I missed the part of the title where it says fastest graphics card. "Greatest Graphics Cards Of All Time" - still can't see it. Great doesn't directly mean fastest at that point in time.

For me, it reads the most memorable/important not fast. That being said, it is written for speed and not best-selling/memorable. I guess the title is just wrong. This must be Tom's.
 


Not really, greatest can mean a number of things.

You simply have to read the first page to understand the context. :)
 
geforce 2 ultra 64 mb. Best and longest card i have ever used. didnt even need to get a gf3 or 4. Still rand cs, quake3 and war3 at 100fps.
 
Some variant of most of those cards has passed through my personal builds. Most of them for barely longer than a year. So if I had to pick the one greatest card, I would have to go with the 4870X2. This based solely on it's useful lifespan being longer than any other card I have ever used.
 
Awesome article! Nvidia was pwning ATI back in the day. Now its a boxing match every year.
Another reason why I love computers and the technology.
 
Eh. I wouldn't really say these were the best of all time. I'd put the GeForce 8800 GT and maybe the Radeon HD 5870 there, but definitely not the 6990/590 or the 5970. Simply because they're the fastest doesn't mean they're the best.
 
and it all ends up with them matching. My favourite vid card of all times was d Radeon x850XT. Damn, that had brute power enough to crunch all cards when using SM2. Problem was when the DX10 came. I really liked that card.
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]Thanks Jimmy. Not sure what I was smoking when i put that in there, but I was bandying about a lot of ancient statistics so It'd have been a miracle if I didn't make a horrendous flub like that at least once.[/citation]

Its all good. It happens to everyone once in a while.

I know how hard it is to remember all the technology thats come, even in the past five years alone. I try o and lose a few things now and then.
 
[citation][nom]AppleBlowsDonkeyBalls[/nom]Eh. I wouldn't really say these were the best of all time. I'd put the GeForce 8800 GT and maybe the Radeon HD 5870 there, but definitely not the 6990/590 or the 5970. Simply because they're the fastest doesn't mean they're the best.[/citation]

Well the 9700 and 9800 were. They took nVidia by suprise and spured our current back and forth.

As for the HD6990, I can see why it and the GTX590 are there. Both are dual GPU cards that can crush any game thrown at them while doing multiple monitor setups as well.
 
I won't list the insane amount of misinformation here, but it must be noted that even the title is misleading, since the article talks about 3D accelerators only, but there were some awesome and important cards in the 2d era as well.
 
i see the best or greatest cards here are based by their technical design to output their best performance for the competition. it was not about value at all.

so my best card which i have even owned was TNT2. hell yah...
 
Everyone has their favorite video cards and will feel vexed to see them not put up or cards that shouldn't be there but are. The one card I got the most use out of at it's time was the ATI AIW 9700pro. This card had so many options and uses and had the same performance as the regular 9700pro's so why it was not up there or ANY of the great line of AIW cards put out by ATI to me is a crime of ignorance. It was sooo much better than most of these cards up there.
And I agree with one post that while the orig. voodoo cards were a add on 3D accelerator then why not put the first dedicated voodoo card that was build as a all in one setup. Don't know the name but I think it had may have been the Voodoo 3000. They also were one of the first to put dual graphics chips on one card. A real milestone and the only reason why Nvidia got on top is because they fooled everyone that 32bit color was better than the 24bit that Voodoo stated was all that was needed and the sad part is they were right. The human eye can not tell the difference and it was just PR garbage and everyone fell for it and this really helped kill the voodoo line.Also Voodoo made the card while Nvidia just made the GPU and Voodoo wasn't really setup to handle it and this also had a hand in their demise. That was very sad.
Nvidia sucked them up for their SLI and what ever else they invented for their cards in the future. I think, that is the 10,000 dollar word here, think,,,,
That this one was not thought through very well. I'll give it a 5 out of 10 rating for the lack of thinking on these ratings as being leaders and innovators in the years of graphics card improvements. And why no mention of the start with the Matrox line and the Tsing (not sure about that ones name or spelling) but they put out some butt kicking 2D video cards. They would run rings around the current video cards for 2D performance even today as a great article on this website got into on how bad 2D performance has gotten. And how Vista and it's poor memory use couldn't handle it very well....
In a way the orig. add on cards from 3DFX was a look into the future because in a way this is what we are really buying now, this year/month/day is 3D accelerated video cards and the 2D part is taken over with cpu and memory and software as they are done now. Those 3D voodoo add ones also made a more important contribution by getting programmers to open up the OPENGL software that made Doom a sure fire hit when it was redone to use this software. All in all I think the 2 most important video cards were the Voodoo cards and the AIW cards from ATI. They broke new grounds and gave us new and useable options for our computers of those days. I sure would NOT put much credit to Nvidia for their start into this arena because the current Voodoo cards were better all the way around.
But like art and cars, everyone has their faves from over the years but lets really look at who gave what innovations that went above and beyond the norm.
Most of those cards listed are just improved versions and only some really added new ground in how 3D was done and how it changed the world of computing as we see it today. I would give 3DFX the crown for their foresight into the future of how graphics are done up to today.
In it's own way it shows that the first one out with the best idea gets killed, like why we are using Blue ray HD and why we had VHS instead of Betamax.
I like to think people ARE smart but we keep on going in the worst direction almost like it's built into our DNA/RNA makeup.... Now THAT IS scary.
 
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