The 23 Greatest Graphics Cards Of All Time

[Guest]

OMG what a useless list ? made by facebook fans or what ??? real lames list...
GeForce 7950 GX2
AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2
GeForce 9800 GX2
AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2
HAHAHAHAHA

 

[daglesj]

Thing is the Voodoo II was lost without its ultimate partner of the time - The Matrox Millenium.

That was the ultimate team up.

 

[seaborn]

I for some reason seem to keep most of my old cards so its neat to go through these and think about the old days. 3dfx VooDoo2 will always be my favorite. I remember installing it in my brand new computer that everyone said was overkill. 450 Mhz and a whole 128 Mb of RAM. Tribes!!!!!!! I still miss that game.

 

[Guest]

Only top of the range GPUs is not "Greatest of All Time" stuff - just a less insightful piece of article without deeper portrayal of the field. 6600gt, (and maybe x1650xt/x1950pro), 8800gt & hd4850 all left out.

 

[mgoldb2]

I was happy to see that the originally GPU for all 3 computers I have built over the past 11 years was on it.

First Computer 1999: Nvidia TNT 2 Ultra
Second Computer 2004: GeForce 6800 Ultra
Third (current Computer) Nov 2008: Radeon 4870 X2.

I have 0 regrets on all 3 GPU's and many hours of gaming enjoyment they help provided (in the case of the 4870 X2 still providing)

 

[frontwing]

My 1st computer 1995; S3 trio 32.
The one i had from the list; Geforce 256, played soldier of fortune a lot
with that card.
Other cards I had;radeon 9000,9200,9550GE,6200,4670 and nowadays a 5670.

 

[jaerba]

I agree with all the comments about the use of the term 'greatest' and what this article reflects. A list of top performing cards is quite frankly boring and a few of those cards were ill-conceived and not very appealing or memorable for most enthusiasts. the GeForce 256 was legendary, the 9800GX2... not so much. It omits context and "personality" and the reasons we like following video cards in the first place. Top 3dmark scores is not one of those reasons.

The Radeon 9500 Pro is like the epitome of what this list should've been about. A tiny little card that, with some love and care, became a monster and matched up with its big brothers and outshined anything Nvidia had to offer.

Also, another +1 to the people who mentioned the Kyro II. Not to mention it came in that sexy blue.

 

[Guest]

ive owned every card till the 6800 ultra. after that i couldnt afford to waste any more money on gpus and i couldnt spend most of my time playing games. what good old days.

 

[eunichron]

What the hell, no Voodoo3 3000?

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]eunichron[/nom]What the hell, no Voodoo3 3000?[/citation]

We mentioned it, read the article.

 

[pyite]

VooDoo 2 4 lyfe! I think I still have it collecting dust somewhere...

 

[Guest]

Ha,ha,ha! Its a bit like taking a trip down money lane, I cant beleive I paid over $1,000 on cards, not even half way up that list!

 

[tsamolotoff]

Well, another weird list... I didn't comment on 25 yrs of Ati, becasue it was too late when I first read the article.

I agree with people who think that the title is really wrong.
1) Either way, you should've included real tops (like X850XT PE instead of X800XT, the 'true' and the last red king X1950XTX with the limited Uber edition signed by Ati CEO himself) as well as some other cards...
2)Why bother with interim GF2 GTS if nV dished Gf2 Ultra half a year after the first of the 'second generation VPU' as they called it, as well as the dying man's vain attempt to regain leadership with GF4 Ti 4800.

Anyways, as I see it, the 'greatest cards' were not the top-priced ones, but those 'overclocker-oriented' ones:

1) 8500 LE - great card with a great chance to unblock the HyperZ and other missing features with one registry tweak (sic!) contended with lower priced GF3 cards and was better at colour/2D because of superior RAMDAC

2) a 'transforming' duo: 256-bit/4pp 9500 (non Pro, many people here apparently don't know Pro version was 128 bit / 8pp and that s**ked) -> 9700 + OC and 9800 SE -> 9800XT. People literally hunted for Sapphire SE cards with 128 mb DDR1 packed in BGA

3) on Ati's side:
a)X800 Pro with Rage chip -> X800 XT PE - hardmod unlock, not so great but it was a good tradition to unlock ati cards those times
b) Gecube and Sapphire X800GTO2 256 mb DDR3 - a fully functional X850PE at X800 non-pro price... It was like you got $250 for $400 card. People hunted for those too.. Savvy dealers here in Russia sold those at a *MUCH* higher price because of that. Personally I had an 'ordinary' X800 non-pro with infamous R430 chip, which didn't overclock and all unlocking attempts failed (probably pp were laser cut)

on NV side:
a) A zillion of GF 6800 'value' cards - all those 6800 LEs, 6800s had a good chance to be unlocked into full 6800GT and overclocked to ultra if you had VF700 CU. Author of this article forgot (accidentally or not) that PCIE revision of the NV40 was not unlockable, hence those cards were not as attractive as X800GTO.

b) Certain 6200 cards did unlock into 6600 ones, but i remember not that many.

c) 6600 was the undisputed king of mid-range gpus, so it was a VC of choice for many gamers who didnt bother with AA or AF.

The next generation:

a) NV continued to hold the throne of mass performance market with their 7600GT cards - ati got their competitor - 1650Pro only a year after the 7600.
b) X1950 Pro was the choice of the time, good price for great performance.

Further generations:

I remember certain 9600GSO 384/768 Mb boards were in fact, G80 or G92 cards, which was cool. It was 8 times faster than my contemporary notebook M56 (aka Radeon X1600) GPU.

 

[rta]

RAGE 128.

 

[mitch074]

There are some mistakes in here, especially about the RivaTNT cards: it never came with 4 Mb, there were "only" 3 supported memory configurations on the market:
- 8 MB VRAM (Video RAM, which accepted a read and a write on each clock cycle, the fastest of the lot)
- 8 MB DRAM (cheap)
- 16 MB DRAM (not very fast, but durable).
The RivaTNT was an excellent investment, as it improved gradually:
- several card makers soon provided Video BIOS updates to implement sideband addressing (mitigating the relative slowness of AGP 2X)
- it held quite well to AGP overclock (mine, at least, could handle up to a 83 MHz AGP clock without corruption, some could handle 100 MHz) at a time when the performance chipset was Intel's 440BX
- on the 16 Mb version, the RAM was clocked at 110MHz, but most cards provided 125 MHz-rated chips: overclocking the RAM did provide a sizeable boost, as all Nvidia chips before the Geforce4 (an overhauled memory manager drastically improved performance for the NV1x and NV2x chip families) were starved for memory bandwidth. Overclocking the chip itself usually didn't work (that's what the TnT2 was about), but increasing the video RAM clock speed led to almost linear performance improvements.
- performance improved a lot with subsequent driver releases: the Detonator 28.xx series, for example, more than doubled the frame rate on the original Unreal fly-by (using the final 2.26 release in DirectX mode, all features enabled: volumetric lights, multitexture, mipmapping, etc.). Actually, it held its own so well I managed to game with it up until GTA3 came out - and then, the 16 Mb of RAM on it were too small to handle the textures and the chip was not powerful enough to render more than a slideshow - but it did render.

To give you an idea, running Unreal's final cinematics (which sees a lot of effects, fast texture loadings and lots of movement) went from an 8 fps average on a "vanilla" card with original drivers, to 21 fps average on a completely patched, overclocked, updated 16 Mb card fit on a 450MHz Celeron-A (BX chipset, 384 Mb of SDRAM).

Ever since, only the RadeonHD 4850 proved as good an investment as that card.

 

[Chapel976]

Do you remember the first card that introduced you to 3D gaming? How about the best accelerator you ever owned? Take a trip with us down memory lane as we recount the 23 most powerful graphics boards of their respective eras.

The 23 Greatest Graphics Cards Of All Time : Read more

Missing the Matrox Millenium and the Obsidian X-24 (the first single chip SLI card ever made)
I had this in my rig... it was awesome.

 

[d1rtyd1z619]

I remember playing Max Payne with my 9700 pro and thinking man it doesn't get better than this.