The Five Best AMD GPUs of All Time

[Admin]

We've peered back through rose-tinted glasses and determined that these are the five greatest and most important AMD graphics cards made under the two-decades-old Radeon brand.

The Five Best AMD GPUs of All Time : Read more

 

[Colif]

My ATI Rage Pro feels overlooked just because it couldn't do 3d. Thats so short sighted

I knew my card wouldn't be on list.

the ones inside the consoles are the most used.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Really? No mention of the HD 4870, the card which immediately caused Nvidia to cut their prices by a third, or more, and made Radeon GPUs actually competitive again after essentially 4 generations of scrap, their first truly competitive card since the 9600XT?

 

[pdegan2814]

I loved my 9700 Pro, that thing was awesome.

 

[COLGeek]

Having owned all of those, I'm not so certain that the "all time" aspect of the story was achieved.

More than a couple (below) that were arguably more significant in the annals of time than the short list of five in the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

 

[maestro0428]

I would say the x1950xt should be on this list. Great card.

 

[brandonjclark]

Really? No mention of the HD 4870, the card which immediately caused Nvidia to cut their prices by a third, or more, and made Radeon GPUs actually competitive again after essentially 4 generations of scrap, their first truly competitive card since the 9600XT?

It's literally mentioned in the article. Do a search, bro!


I used to own a 9800xt (R360 die). At the time, it was an incredible beast.

ATI Radeon 9800 XT Specs

ATI R360, 412 MHz, 8 Pixel Shaders, 4 Vertex Shaders, 8 TMUs, 8 ROPs, 256 MB DDR, 365 MHz, 256 bit

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Amdlova]

The best in class is the 9700pro-xt
The 3870
The 4870
The 6870
And the rx 480/580

All these card have performance / dollar ratio

 

[Noir106]

Maybe I'm just newer to the scene, but I think the 5700 xt and r9 290x deserve spots here and the 9700 pro really shouldn't even be here since AMD didn't acquire ATI until after. I feel like this recent gen of AMD Radeon cards just left a bad taste in everyone's mouth so no one's willing to praise Navi or Vega.

 

[mitch074]

Really? No mention of the HD 4870, the card which immediately caused Nvidia to cut their prices by a third, or more, and made Radeon GPUs actually competitive again after essentially 4 generations of scrap, their first truly competitive card since the 9600XT?

its little brother the HD4850 stayed a recommendation on this very website for 2 years and 7 months - It was a budget GPU from the get-go, but damn, was it a good investment !
The R300 in general was the first fully programmable GPU ever - it supported DirectX 9.0c before it even came out ! Damn, if you tried hard enough, you could run Windows 7 with all bells and whistles on it.

 

[Makaveli]

I've owned all of these cards also.

Good times!

 

[btmedic04]

ATi was founded in 1985 and was acquired by AMD 21 years later in 2006. AMD still has another 4 years to go before their ownership exceeds ATi's existence as a stand alone company.

ATi Launched their first stand alone 2d/3d accelerator in 1996 known as the 3d rage.

I get that this kind of article is subjective, but at least get the history correct.

 

[jeremyj_83]

I loved my 9700 Pro, that thing was awesome.

I had the upgraded 9800 Pro with 128MB RAM and it was insane. Prior to that I have a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. The difference between them was night and day.

 

[Thunder64]

"Historically, AMD (and ATI previously) had always been able to rely on its ability to get to cutting-edge nodes quicker than Nvidia.".

Not really. In fact, ATi used 150nm for R300 while Nvidia used 130nm for Geforce FX. We all know how that went. Which brings me to:

"Except Nvidia gave the world GTX 400-series GPUs powered by the Fermi architecture, which is universally agreed to be Nvidia's worst disaster ever.".

I don't think many would agree with that. The FX series was a disaster. I think Fermi was better than that. FX was bad in enough in DX8. But it DX9, it was beyond a dumpster fire.

The FX5900 lost to the 9550 in Half Life 2! The 9700 Pro had more than 3x the FPS.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

I'll date myself. I had a Radeon 7200 (non-AIO). It was much better than the Nvidia RIVA TNT2. I up/downgraded to the dreaded MX 440, which caused artifacts. Turns out the computer only supported PCI and not AGP. Sent that back and got an AGP machine with a Radeon 9000. Mid-graded to a 9600, which was modestly better. From there I wanted to get an X800 or X850, but the AGP variant was rarer than the dodo, so I decided to build for the first time. Got a nice X1950XT right around the time multi-core CPUs came out. That golden era lasted until the fan went bust and then I got an HD4850.

Looking back, I was always rooting for Team ATI, not AMD.

 

[motocros1]

my high school friend got me into gaming and my first dedicated gpu was a 9600 xt. i got out of gaming computers for a while and didn't really bother with a newer gpu until last year when i bought the 6800 xt lightly used for 300$. i do remember all the talk back in the day at the lan parties about the 9800 pro (or xt) a guy won in a gpu drawing and how it was so heavy it came with a bracket to hold the end of the card up.

 

[tom111111]

My favourites I owned are the RX 290X, RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooling and the RX 6900 XT.

 

[unis_torvalds]

Great scott! Where's the HD 4850? The Rage 128?

 

[cristovao]

What about ATI 8500 vs Geforce 3?

 

[jonathan1683]

9800 pro was my first and last ATI/AMD card. 😀

 

[ilukey77]

5700xt red devil ( after the driver fixes ) best looking card and a great cheaper option to the 2070 !!

 

[techfreak]

Hardware maybe good but AMD/ATI drivers in general are not very good.
Only until recent period than drivers were much better than in the older days.

 

[thestryker]

The 9700 Pro should be at the top of anyone's list for impact alone. The performance was fantastic and nvidia had likely been sitting on the Detonator 40 drivers which increased GeForce 4 performance within a couple weeks of launch. This closed the gap a bit and made the "our drivers are better" more of a viable argument.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Hardware maybe good but AMD/ATI drivers in general are not very good.
Only until recent period than drivers were much better than in the older days.

I've used AMD cards almost exclusively since 2003 and never had driver issues.

 

[Thunder64]

I've used AMD cards almost exclusively since 2003 and never had driver issues.

It was once a problem. Like in the Rage 128 days and maybe early Radeons. These days it is just a tired line repeated by people who have probably never used AMD or at least not anytime recently.