The Five Best AMD GPUs of All Time

[artk2219]

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.

Yep, in the early 2000's drivers were a mess all around, Nvidia did better than most of the others at the time, but even they released their fair share of stinkers. Honestly I haven't had video drivers cause an issue in a LONG time, and even then I haven't had a driver update fully kill my OS install since like 2000 or 2001. Sure maybe I had to do a system restore, but I haven't had to do that since the late 2000's. Ironically it was with a GTS 250, there's that extra awesome driver reliability Nvidia's known for .

Like this old gem, granted that's an ancient article about an ancient OS, still 30% at the time is nuts:

NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007

That huge bundle of damning emails and documents Microsoft produced as part of the Vista-capable lawsuit is full of fascinating information about how the company developed, planned, and launched Vista, but the latest juicy nugget to come out if it suggests that a lot of problems faced by the...

www.engadget.com

 

[valthuer]

One of the best purchases i've ever made, was back in 2011: i bought an MSI Radeon HD 6950 for 300$, flashed its BIOS into a 6970 and, in an instant, became the proud owner of maybe the second best GPU at that time.

Those were the days, man!

 

[Amdlova]

The 4870 with blower is a dream the heat build on the room is insanely... perfect oven my dream of crossfire comes with the 4870 and a 4850. That days make a hell look frozen lol

 

[mitch074]

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

In DirectX, maybe - in OpenGL, that was another matter entirely. Still, at least they made an effort with them - Catalyst (as they were named back then) OpenGL drivers got a massive rewrite starting in 2009, and were actually open sourced by the mid-2010. Performance and stability improvements on the open source version were so great that AMD actually started moving their proprietary driver structure to the open source one, and ended up recommending the open source driver over their own for all tasks apart from registered pro applications.
Oh - yeah, that was on Linux. It's been 10 years now that the AMD driver got past the Nvidia package for me in terms of ease of use and performance.
On Windows, Vista and WDDM 1.0 caused quite a few problems to all GPU makers. Nvidia managed to solve it by throwing a lot of manpower at it, but it's true that until 2009, AMD's Catalyst package caused a lot of trouble to many people. When you weren't a techie and were stuck with Vista, Catalyst was a pain in the butt ; downgrading to WinXP did solve many things, but until AMD managed to rewrite the 2D portion of their driver and Win7 became prevalent enough to solve the woes of Vista's SysRAM to VRAM swapping and Catalyst could handle it (which was only fully solved around 2011), Nvidia did have better drivers.
That's pretty much when AMD started their work on Mantle, because making DirectX and OpenGL drivers was becoming very hard on the budget-starved AMD where Nvidia could dedicate whole teams to driver optimization, and GCN suffered greatly from it; that's when AMD's GPU started aging "like fine wine", because drivers needed a lot of baking before they were really ready and many features were only enabled rather late in a GPU's life cycle.
Note that I did have several AMD cards by then : a HD4850 (lasted 4 years, heavily modded, went out in a puff of smoke, went through XP, Vista, 7 and Linux), a HD7770 (only saw 7 and Linux, still running in my media center), a R9 270X (the 7770 couldn't push out enough pixels to drive a 1440p screen, mostly ran Linux), a RX 480 8Gb (Linux full time, I still have it somewhere) and I saw all these drivers come and go... They were rather bad, but they did get better over time, where Nvidia drivers had a tendency to nerf older cards.

 

[mitch074]

The 4870 with blower is a dream the heat build on the room is insanely... perfect oven my dream of crossfire comes with the 4870 and a 4850. That days make a hell look frozen lol

The 4850 had a puny single slot cooler; putting a dual slot cooler on it made it very cold and very quiet. Especially if you hacked the VBIOS to allow it to clock the GPU and VRAM down lower than default, which they could totally do - still performed the same, but would get much much MUCH cooler, especially at idle.

 

[jeremyj_83]

In DirectX, maybe - in OpenGL, that was another matter entirely.

Interestingly I never had trouble even playing OpenGL games on my 9800 Pro. Maybe I was lucky but I also was running Win2k and eventually XP on that computer. Therefore I never had the same problems people had with Vista and WDDM 1.0.

 

[Thunder64]

In DirectX, maybe - in OpenGL, that was another matter entirely. Still, at least they made an effort with them - Catalyst (as they were named back then) OpenGL drivers got a massive rewrite starting in 2009, and were actually open sourced by the mid-2010. Performance and stability improvements on the open source version were so great that AMD actually started moving their proprietary driver structure to the open source one, and ended up recommending the open source driver over their own for all tasks apart from registered pro applications.
Oh - yeah, that was on Linux. It's been 10 years now that the AMD driver got past the Nvidia package for me in terms of ease of use and performance.
On Windows, Vista and WDDM 1.0 caused quite a few problems to all GPU makers. Nvidia managed to solve it by throwing a lot of manpower at it, but it's true that until 2009, AMD's Catalyst package caused a lot of trouble to many people. When you weren't a techie and were stuck with Vista, Catalyst was a pain in the butt ; downgrading to WinXP did solve many things, but until AMD managed to rewrite the 2D portion of their driver and Win7 became prevalent enough to solve the woes of Vista's SysRAM to VRAM swapping and Catalyst could handle it (which was only fully solved around 2011), Nvidia did have better drivers.
That's pretty much when AMD started their work on Mantle, because making DirectX and OpenGL drivers was becoming very hard on the budget-starved AMD where Nvidia could dedicate whole teams to driver optimization, and GCN suffered greatly from it; that's when AMD's GPU started aging "like fine wine", because drivers needed a lot of baking before they were really ready and many features were only enabled rather late in a GPU's life cycle.
Note that I did have several AMD cards by then : a HD4850 (lasted 4 years, heavily modded, went out in a puff of smoke, went through XP, Vista, 7 and Linux), a HD7770 (only saw 7 and Linux, still running in my media center), a R9 270X (the 7770 couldn't push out enough pixels to drive a 1440p screen, mostly ran Linux), a RX 480 8Gb (Linux full time, I still have it somewhere) and I saw all these drivers come and go... They were rather bad, but they did get better over time, where Nvidia drivers had a tendency to nerf older cards.

I had no problem using OpenGL on a Rage 128 to play Half Life back in the late 90's. Or Direct3D for that matter. The game just seemed to run faster on OpenGL.

 

[systemBuilder_49]

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

I think the ATI mobility 9600 deserves mention. It powered about half of all thinkpad T40, T41, T42 laptops which were best-sellers introduced in 2005. It was a great GPU and one of the first that could play half-life in a mobile setting (800x600, 30fps i think) at decent frame rates without crashing all the time.

ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Specs

ATI M10, 300 MHz, 4 Pixel Shaders, 2 Vertex Shaders, 4 TMUs, 4 ROPs, 128 MB DDR, 200 MHz, 64 bit

www.techpowerup.com

 

[mitch074]

I had no problem using OpenGL on a Rage 128 to play Half Life back in the late 90's. Or Direct3D for that matter. The game just seemed to run faster on OpenGL.

That's with OpenGL 1.2 to 1.5, when DirectX was at version 5 - 6... And entirely crappy when compared to the comparatively far more mature OpenGL API and at the time, not as fragmented). Yeah, at the time OpenGL ruled right behind 3dfx's Glide, and most games supported at least a couple rendering APIs along with software rendering. Half-Life's still very dominantly Quake-based engine sure as heck ran better on OpenGL.
The Rage 128 was a relatively capable 3D accelerator (I had one in my laptop), but for a long time, if you didn't run a game that was developed against it, you did run the risk of very bad performance, glitches or crashes.

 

[Thunder64]

That's with OpenGL 1.2 to 1.5, when DirectX was at version 5 - 6... And entirely crappy when compared to the comparatively far more mature OpenGL API and at the time, not as fragmented). Yeah, at the time OpenGL ruled right behind 3dfx's Glide, and most games supported at least a couple rendering APIs along with software rendering. Half-Life's still very dominantly Quake-based engine sure as heck ran better on OpenGL.
The Rage 128 was a relatively capable 3D accelerator (I had one in my laptop), but for a long time, if you didn't run a game that was developed against it, you did run the risk of very bad performance, glitches or crashes.

That was back in the day when saying ATi had bad drivers was a valid argument.

 

[Order 66]

I think there needs to be an expanded top 10 list maybe including some of the GPUs that have been mentioned.

 

[Hotrod2go]

Have to agree with the RX 6800 XT, have a factory OC version & its the fastest, yet coolest running card I've ever owned @1440p/144Hz in over 20 yrs of owning & regularly using GPUs for different resolutions & refresh rates.

 

[mitch074]

The Radeon RX 480 8 Gb... I bought it new a month after it came out (July 2016), I almost sold it a month later - it had doubled in price : first cryptoboom. But I wanted to play, so I kept it and waited for a better deal. And waited. And waited.
I replaced it last year with a RX 6600XT, just because - it was still working quite nicely, and still pushing just enough pixels in my games - best GPU ever (at least since the original 3dfx Voodoo 1 - yeah, I'm old). Especially with a replacement for its cooler (I had the reference design), and I still own it - 6 years of relevance is quite a record.

 

[Bluoper]

I got my first amd gpu a few months ago, the Rx 6800, great price for 16gb of vram and a beefy gpu overall, I think it's a bit overshadowed by the xt variant, there is a decent performance gap between them but that also ment the 6800 could be found for really cheap for what it is.

 

[LaminarFlow]

I stayed in ATi/AMD camp from 2003 to 2019 due to limit budget as a college/graduate student. To date I still vividly remember spending $125 for Asus 4850 on Black Friday 2008. It is still far and beyond the best bang-for-buck computer purchase I've ever made. Equally vivid was the memory of 4870 costing $199 and I couldn't afford it back then while pinching pennies for grocery bill.

 

[spongiemaster]

That was back in the day when saying ATi had bad drivers was a valid argument.

They still do. From just a week ago.

Alienware M18 issues can be resolved by using older RX 7900M GPU drivers

First flagship mobile GPU from AMD in years. Only one product from Alienware uses it. It was mentioned in the press release announcing the GPU's release. AMD managed to break something in the power management with a driver update. The "laptop" was idling at over 100W, and would use 25W when sleeping after the driver update. AMD couldn't bother to test their drivers on the only product that uses their new flagship GPU?

From 3 years ago. Well after ATi. One of the most pro AMD channels on the web and they recommended against buying Navi 7 months after release because of how bad the drivers were.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uynVO4ZXl0

 

[7K320]

Also in the RX 480 -> RX 6600 (non-XT in my case) camp. I don't know which was the better deal, the RX 480 8 GB or its predecessor HD 6870 which was even cheaper when I bought it a month or two before the 7000 series was released. But that RX 480 was my primary and most powerful GPU for six years, almost got sold for nearly twice what I'd bought it for in early 2021, and still purrs quietly when I run games on it.

And it handled VR just fine when I ran it. Max settings, maybe not, but 90 FPS steady on the HTC Vive. Not saying I'd buy one for VR today, and I moved on from VR before Alyx, but at its time, it was a very economical card to have to try out VR, at a time when the entry price for the headsets themselves were higher. I doubt I would have bought a VR set if a flagship system had been required, and I wouldn't have kept it if the RX 480 hadn't been able to keep pace with the VR games of the time.

 

[lordmogul]

The 4850 had a puny single slot cooler; putting a dual slot cooler on it made it very cold and very quiet. Especially if you hacked the VBIOS to allow it to clock the GPU and VRAM down lower than default, which they could totally do - still performed the same, but would get much much MUCH cooler, especially at idle.

I had a HD 4870 back in the day and simply set up a 2D profile in Afterburner, no need to mod any BIOS (which I did anyway, but only to flash my OC on the card) And another profile for less demanding games.
Made it much more efficient, especially since it didn't clock down the memory in idle. Something about changing VRAM clock causing black frames. Which didn't cause any instability, just something that doesn't look good.

 

[mitch074]

I had a HD 4870 back in the day and simply set up a 2D profile in Afterburner, no need to mod any BIOS (which I did anyway, but only to flash my OC on the card) And another profile for less demanding games.
Made it much more efficient, especially since it didn't clock down the memory in idle. Something about changing VRAM clock causing black frames. Which didn't cause any instability, just something that doesn't look good.

I did flash it for one simple reason : Afterburner doesn't run on Linux (and I was steadily switching over to the penguin at the time already), and I really wanted my PC to stop being so noisy at idle.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I have three of these cards (HD 5870, HD 7970 and RX 6800 XT) and while this is a great list, I do believe that the HD 4870 is far more deserving to be here than the RX 480. I'm not saying that because the RX 480 was bad, but because ATi was considered left for dead until the release of the HD 4870. It was SO good a value that I bought it over the GTX 260 and have never looked back. The HD 4870 was definitely a milestone GPU for me.

 

[Avro Arrow]

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

Yeah, I'm in a similar boat as you. I bought an HD 4870 in 2008 and have only owned Radeons since. These "driver issues" are most likely ID.10.T errors committed by clueless noobs or hardware problems that they blamed on drivers.

One weirdo even claimed that his drivers "deleted themselves".

 

[Order 66]

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

I've used AMD cards (albeit since only last year) with an RX 550 at first and an RX 6800 currently and never had driver issues.

 

[hfxmike]

This should be near the top:

And this:

And the 6870.

 

[Order 66]

This should be near the top:

And this:

And the 6870.

While I agree, you do realize this is a list of exclusively AMD cards, right? I mean there is not a single other mention (AFAIK) of an Nvidia card except yours.

 

[hfxmike]

While I agree, you do realize this is a list of exclusively AMD cards, right? I mean there is not a single other mention (AFAIK) of an Nvidia card except yours.

DoH!!!!!! That would explain the omissions!. gahhh SMH