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What you seem to fail to realize is that when the 9700 Pro debuted it was up to three times faster (and this was with release drivers) than the best nVidia had to offer at the time.

Now in terms of absolute importance, a case can be made for the early VooDoo cards, but that was in the infancy of 3D...The cards they were competing against were referred to as 3D decelerators for a reason. It would be like me defeating a toddler in basketball and thus proclaiming myself Michael Jordan. Never before and never since has a card towered above it's competitors the way the 9700 Pro did, the only thing even close to that was the nVidia 8800 series. The 460 is just a great mid range card probably about on par for it's time with the Radeon 4850, and certainly not as good as the 9500 Pro was.
 
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YBS1 said:
What you seem to fail to realize is that when the 9700 Pro debuted it was up to 2.5 times faster (and this was with release drivers) than the best nVidia had to offer at the time.

Now in terms of absolute importance, a case can be made for the early VooDoo cards, but that was in the infancy of 3D...The cards they were competing against were referred to as 3D decelerators for a reason. It would be like me defeating a toddler in basketball and thus proclaiming myself Michael Jordan. Never before and never since has a card towered above it's competitors the way the 9700 Pro did, the only thing even close to that was the nVidia 8800 series. The 460 is just a great mid range card probably about on par for it's time with the Radeon 4850, and certainly not as good as the 9500 Pro was.
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I'm not sure why you downplay the achievements of the 3dfx voodoo. It was a dramatic leap forward in visual computing and revolutionized the industry - it influenced everything that followed, period. If it had not been for 3dfx inspiring the likes of nvidia and ATI, the 9700 pro would not have happened in the same timeframe.... Keep in mind ATI struggled for years trying to get something with decent 3d performance, by all accounts it was not easy.

The other cards (such as s3 virge, etc) did not have great 3d performance, but I assure its not because they weren't trying.
 
Now in terms of absolute importance, a case can be made for the early VooDoo cards,

It doesn't really seem like I was downplaying it.
 
ExarKun333 said:
I included the 9500pro as an 'honorable mention' because the early models could be fully-unlocked to a 9700pro. That was AMAZING! Those cards were monsters back in the day and Geforce FX was just junk initially. The 6800GT was a pretty good product, but NV was not back in the game fully until the 8800 series.

It's is pretty insane to think that someone who bought a 8800GTX at launch in 2006 STILL can play most games, albeit at reduced IQ. Amazing longevity.
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One of the features that was nifty on the nVidia FX series was a feature called image sharpening; it sharpened the image for games as well and sort of a negative lod effect that didn't add any artifacts to textures. It would be neat to still have this feature today.
 
ExarKun333 said:
I included the 9500pro as an 'honorable mention' because the early models could be fully-unlocked to a 9700pro. That was AMAZING! Those cards were monsters back in the day and Geforce FX was just junk initially. The 6800GT was a pretty good product, but NV was not back in the game fully until the 8800 series.

It's is pretty insane to think that someone who bought a 8800GTX at launch in 2006 STILL can play most games, albeit at reduced IQ. Amazing longevity.
Click to expand...
I own an 8800GTX and it's definitely no good for playing any games more demanding than Bioshock and even then you will want to be reducing a couple of settings or forgoing AA.
 
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