The five best Nvidia GPUs of all time: Looking back at over 20 years of Nvidia history

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
cknobman said:
Still rock my 1080ti graphics card today!
Truly the GOAT.

Giving the 4090 an honorable mention seems a little shill IMHO.
Regardless of how powerful it is the price should keep it off this list and any honorable mentions.
Click to expand...
You might want to read that a bit more closely.

"Honorable and Dishonorable Mention — GeForce RTX 4090"

It's both a good GPU and a bad GPU and we wanted to highlight it as sort of a microcosm of everything that's going on right now. I love the performance it offers, and even the cooling and design of the Founders Edition is great. But that dang 16-pin connector, plus the pricing — which is getting even higher now — are terrible. It's a bit like the 30-series in that sense, except it's not screwed up by cryptomining but rather by other factors.

FWIW, there are still two more articles in this series coming: the Worst AMD GPUs and the Worst Nvidia GPUs. For precisely the same reasons, the 4090 doesn't fully belong on the worst list. So when you look at the full picture (best and worst), the 4090 stands out as one card in particular that warrants mention on both lists. Hence, the Honorable and Dishonorable bit.
 
  • Like
Reactions: adbatista, artk2219, valthuer and 5 others
hmmm... flrom all time? maybe you forgot the 4600 series ot the 6800 series, gt and ti.... they were the begining of a whole new era, WHERE ARE THEY? jeeezzzz.... new kids who didn't live back then :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: artk2219
warezme said:
Surprised the 2080ti was mentioned. It was an amazing card for it's time. Totally made the much venerated 1080 series seem outdated right away. Featuring the first truly useful raytracing features.
Click to expand...
It was also a huge jump in price.

I agree, G92 missing seems out of place. 8800GT was THE card to have of that era. I was one of the few that ended up with a 8800GTS G80 because I wanted a DX10 card immediately for some upcoming game releases.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lordmogul, artk2219, rolli59 and 3 others
Roland Of Gilead said:
Ah lads, I surely would have thought THE first 'GPU' would be there. If it wasn't for the first, then none other would follow. The venerable Geforce 256 SDR/DDR. First named GPU card all the way back in '99. Before this everything was an accelerator.
Click to expand...
We did discuss this and ultimately felt that the GeForce SDR/DDR wasn't as revolutionary in its day as some of the others. Yes, it paved the way, but then so did the Riva TNT and TNT2 — there would be no GeForce if not for the original TNT card in 1998.

If we go by Tom's testing back in 1999, looking at the 1024x768 results as being more representative of what people were using (I did buy a 1600x1200 monitor back then, but it wasn't great for gaming until the early 2000s with faster GPUs), the GeForce 256 SDR was only 15% faster than the TNT2 Ultra. It was a bigger jump of 38% against the TNT2, though, and the GeForce 256 DDR was 32% faster than the TNT2 Ultra.

The real issue was that, back in the day, most of those GeForce features (hardware T&L) weren't really utilized until two or three generations later. So it was mostly just a modest bump in performance and paving the way for the future.

Today, over 24 years later, the original GeForce cards created the name but they're far enough in the past that I don't think most people pay much attention to them. If we do the best Intel CPUs of all time, do we need to list the 8086, just because it was first? Some would say yes, unequivocally, and others would be just as adamant in saying no. 🤷‍♂️
 
  • Like
Reactions: artk2219, Amdlova, Loadedaxe and 3 others
Eximo said:
It was also a huge jump in price.

I agree, G92 missing seems out of place. 8800GT was THE card to have of that era. I was one of the few that ended up with a 8800GTS G80 because I wanted a DX10 card immediately for some upcoming game releases.
Click to expand...
8800 was an absolute game changer, no pun intended of it's time. I had bought two 8800GTX's and ran them in SLI for years. Those were the days.
 
  • Like
Reactions: artk2219 and stonecarver
Order 66 said:
I have been waiting for this for a long time. I got impatient and started a thread similar to it a while back. I do definitely agree about the 1080 Ti in the number one spot. I mean it is still viable today.

For anyone interested, here is the thread I started: https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...ons-you-have-ever-seen.3822430/#post-23134762
Click to expand...

Even in that thread people were saying 8800 over 1080. They are right. The 8800 GT was viable for a long time. I only replaced mine when it started to fail because it lasted so long.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AntonyLovric, stonecarver, artk2219 and 2 others
JarredWaltonGPU said:
We did discuss this and ultimately felt that the GeForce SDR/DDR wasn't as revolutionary in its day as some of the others. Yes, it paved the way, but then so did the Riva TNT and TNT2 — there would be no GeForce if not for the original TNT card in 1998.

If we go by Tom's testing back in 1999, looking at the 1024x768 results as being more representative of what people were using (I did buy a 1600x1200 monitor back then, but it wasn't great for gaming until the early 2000s with faster GPUs), the GeForce 256 SDR was only 15% faster than the TNT2 Ultra. It was a bigger jump of 38% against the TNT2, though, and the GeForce 256 DDR was 32% faster than the TNT2 Ultra.

The real issue was that, back in the day, most of those GeForce features (hardware T&L) weren't really utilized until two or three generations later. So it was mostly just a modest bump in performance and paving the way for the future.

Today, over 24 years later, the original GeForce cards created the name but they're far enough in the past that I don't think most people pay much attention to them. If we do the best Intel CPUs of all time, do we need to list the 8086, just because it was first? Some would say yes, unequivocally, and others would be just as adamant in saying no. 🤷‍♂️
Click to expand...
From a performance stand point you're not wrong BUT from nostalgia stand point I think you may well be wrong. The Geforce 256 changed the game for gamers (pun intended), even if only in their own heads in terms of performance. I remember happily swapping out my 3D graphics accelerator Riva TnT 2 ultra for the first GPU in my Geforce 256.

The Geforce 256 was a milestone in the graphics department imho. It wasn't a monster no but it was a game changer in how we viewed our 3D graphic acceleration and how Nvidia's cards were named (long term).

Personally I'd of dropped the RTX 3060 12GB, replaced it with a Geforce 256 and given the TnT2 a honerable mention along side the 4090.

But to each their own. I respect your list even if I'd done it differently. But in the future....in some way...include the Geforce 256. It will be forever a game changer for the market imho.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: AntonyLovric, artk2219, valthuer and 4 others
it's currently the fastest GPU for gaming by a decent margin
Click to expand...
A decent margin? It dominates AMD’s current flagship GPU. According to numbers posted in your latest “best gpu’s for gaming 2023”, the 4090 is ~33% faster than the 7900 XTX at 1080p and ~50% faster at 4K. The kids call this a “brutal mogging” and we’re not even discussing ray tracing or frame generation superiority. In my view, the 4090 is the first truly 4k capable card where one can play 4k without suffering poor frame rates or sacrificing image quality.

While the power connector is a case of poor engineering, the issue still boils down to user error (an error that the engineers should have accounted for).

Price is also a poor excuse to keep the card off the list with the performance margin as large as it is. High prices are here to stay, unfortunately; for nVidia to use capacity on GPUs instead of DC products requires they make margins comparable to their DC products or they’d just make more DC products whose demand has skyrocketed. With such strong demand for 4090’s, price based exclusion is a cop-out - how can such a generationally dominant card not be one of the greatest GPU’s?
 
Thunder64 said:
Even in that thread people were saying 8800 over 1080. They are right. The 8800 GT was viable for a long time. I only replaced mine when it started to fail because it lasted so long.
Click to expand...
Rofl....same but on the 8800 GTX (had some 8800 GTs as well.. folding@home). I even had to resolder caps that came off 3 years in from a bad solder point (solder had bubbles and was grey not shiny). And it ran another 4 years afterwards 24/7 in a one of my four folding@home servers (4 cards per server....my power bill was insane but I was still single back then and could afford it lol). The 8800 were a great series of cards. Particularly the 8800 gt.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: artk2219, Roland Of Gilead, Order 66 and 1 other person
No 8800gt is a big omission. Also the 980 being 10% faster wasn't exactly "wiping the floor" with the 780ti I skipped that gen entirely to go to the 1080ti. Surprised the 3060 was on the list since I never really rated it over the 2060 tho 3000 series availability was its big problem. Also no mention of any cards pre 8800 series. The tnt2 was pretty ground breaking in the day taking 3d acceleration main stream in a single card.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Thunder64 and atomicWAR
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom