Discussion Tom's Hardware top 5 AMD and Nvidia GPUs

[MrTeal]

Tom's brought out the 5 worst AMD cards today, assuming the 5 worst Nvidia is soon to follow. What's funny is that I still have a 7970, a couple HD6870's that I ran in Crossfire before that, and my secondary gamer still has an AMD Vega 64LC in it. I also have an 8800GTS-512 sitting around, an HD4890, and RX-580'S in my wife's current build and one of my older PC's.

Even though I go a few years between new builds, I can't bring myself to throw old stuff out. I have at least three mobo/cpu boards siting in boxes, each sporting a Hyper 212 cooler IIRC.

The 6870 was great value, especially after GCN launched. I bought one in Jan 2012 for $75 AR and it was a great gaming card for me. Today $75 will buy you a 1030, which really isn't even faster than it.

290X in the top 5 worst is a laugh. It's not as good a value as the 290, but it was still a good GPU. The guy's points seem to be:

• Faster than 780 for less at launch, but then Nvidia cut the price on the 780 and launched the Ti
  • Yeah, but it was still 10% faster than the 780 for 10% more money
  • The 780 Ti was less than 10% faster and still had 67% the VRAM, for $150 more
• Didn't age well
  • This is nuts. Yeah Maxwell was a huge improvement and the $330 GTX970 was great, but getting the same performance of the top end at 60% of the price a year later with a new gen was the norm then.
  • Compared to its actual contemporary the 780 Ti, by the time Maxwell launched the 290X and 780 Ti were now testing about even in big test suites and the 290X was faster in more modern games despite having cost less. By the time Pascal launched Kepler had falled even further behind.
• AMD lost money in 2013 and a ton in 2014
  • AMD did run into issues with a glut of mining cards due to crypto cycles, but that has nothing to do the the 290X as a card
  • Had as much to do with them selling 315mm² Piledriver chips for a pittance because Haswell was better in almost every way.

 

[amenx]

For Nvidia, the 1080ti and 8800gtx are only ones that make sense. The rest look like a monkey randomly picked them out of a jar.

 

[dr1337]

In Canada, it was possible to to get a 7970 for 369.99 just 6 months after launch on top of a 6 game bundle. These type of poor margin moves are what moved the graphics division to China.

In the US the 7950 was still $350 over a year and a half later, I know because I bought one, a lot of people like me woulda wished they got that cheap that fast. Also the graphics division in china thing is a weird statement that obviously isn't true considering the state of their graphics right now.

You're really trying to re-write history here, 7000 series launch was a peak in their market share; Radeon sales were already on the decline and not even that bad for the time.

HD 7000 wasn't bad by any means and generally speaking the 680 was always more expensive until GTX 700 came out.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

The five worst AMD GPUs of all time: So bad we can't forget them

Historically awful AMD GPUs.

www.tomshardware.com

- There, the bad AMD GPU list.

It's a terrible list. I honestly can't even fathom why they would publish that.

5 - 290x
4 - RX 7600
3 - RX 6500xt
2 - Fury X
1 - Vega 64

The 6500xt is a good pick and the Fury X is an ok pick but the rest are either average or in the case of the 290x actually pretty solid cards.

No 2900xt or 3870? No X800 which couldn't even do full DX9.0 (MS had to come up with DX9.0c for NV and b for ATI).

A really spicy, controversial one would have been the 5870 or 6970. AMD could have scaled up and gotten the Halo part while NV's big inefficient dies were saddled with CUDA in its infancy but instead AMD stupidly chose to go with the small die strategy which has allowed NV to entrench itself in professional markets and become the juggernaut it is today.

 

[Heartbreaker]

My two previous GPUs, so I may be biased on these:
8800 GT
9700 Pro

Which were both epic in their day.

Of the rest, the only standout to me of similar stature is the 1080 Ti.

 

[MrTeal]

Wonder how the Nvidia list will go. I don't think it'll look like this, but mine might look something like this.

5. GTX 4060 Ti, either flavor
4. GTX 480
3. GTX 2080
2. FX 5800 Ultra
1. GTX 280

 

[Panino Manino]

People always remember 8800GT but what I remember is that the 8600GT was much more popular.

 

[Heartbreaker]

People always remember 8800GT but what I remember is that the 8600GT was much more popular.

I don't remember seeing any sales figures, but I would bet people that bought an 8600GT in the months before the 8800GT was available wished they waited, and 8600 GT reviews were ho-hum:

DX10 for the Masses: NVIDIA 8600 and 8500 Series Launch

www.anandtech.com

Comments are funny, It's like the same complaints aimed at Ada cards. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

shabby - Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 128bit/256meg for $200 bucks? Gimme a break.

Sunrise089 - Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - ... they offer less performance than even midrange parts from the last get. Anyone remember how a 6600GT offreed 9800pro beating performance, and how nVidia sold millions of them. I don't see that happening here.

Toebot - Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - No, nothing to sneeze at, just something to blow my nose on! Utter wretch. This card is NVidia's attempt to milk the Vista market, nothing more.

OTOH, 6 months later, the 8800 GT was a bombshell:

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT: The Only Card That Matters

www.anandtech.com

 

[AMDJunkie]

The five best AMD GPUs of all time: Looking back at 20 years of Radeon GPUs

A historical look at Team Red's best of the best.

www.tomshardware.com

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

The best gaming GPUs from team green.

www.tomshardware.com

Nvidia
5- RTX 3060 (2021)
4- GTX 680 (2012)
3- GTX 980 (2014)
2- 8800 GTX (2006)
1- GTX 1080 Ti (2017)

AMD
5- RX 480 8GB (2016)
4- RX 6800 XT (2020)
3- HD7970 (2012)
2- HD 5870 (2009)
1- 9700 Pro (2002)

Interesting lists, but there definitely seems to be some recency bias and a preference for top cards. I'd argue that some families should have been included that weren't and some were not even the best cards of their generation, but I'd be interested to see other people's takes. Here's a few I look back at that weren't listed that could have made top 5

NV
8800 GT - The 8800 GTX was amazing. If you had $600 in 2006, it was way faster than anything else out there. A little less than a year later they dropped essentially a die shrunk version of the G80 chip with almost the same performance, for a theoretical $250. Good luck finding one at that price, but even at $300 it was a doubling of performance/$ a hair under a year later, and made the HD2900XT look like a joke. AMD would eventually respond with the excellent HD 4870 8 months later at the same $300 price point, but for awhile as Anandtech said it was the only GPU that mattered.

GTX 970 - Yes, NV was skeezy. Yeah, they deserve the blowback they got for that 512MB of vram off on its own. The 970 was still a fantastic card though, and one of the last times NV really gave a huge Perf/$ advantage to the step down series. It was literally 60% of the price of a GTX980, and that card was only 10% faster at 1080P.

RTX3080 - It might be a bit much to call Turing a debacle, but it sure didn't represent a huge leap forward in performance at any price point. Ampere on the other hand... was a mixed bag. The 3090 was launched at Titan pricing levels, and the 3070 while a couple hundred cheaper than the $700 sticker on the 3080 it just couldn't hang with GA102 especially at higher resolutions. The 3080 though was great. It was 30% faster than the 2080 Ti, and destroyed the similarly priced at launch 2080 by ~70% at 4k. If you missed out and then kept HODLing for the next gen, you now get to save a cnote and spend $600 on an RTX 4070 that's the same or slower than it at 1440p and 4k. Bonus points if you bought one near launch and paid it off in a few months mining Eth overnight.

AMD
HD 5850 - The 5870 was a great card compared to Fermi, but the real star was the 5850. $260 vs $380, but the same memory bus and size, same ROPs, and just a 10% cut to shaders vs the big card meant that if you pushed a slider up to equalize the clocks you got within 10% of an overclocked 5870 for less that 70% of the price.

R9 290 - Another tiny cut to only shaders for a big drop in price, the 290X drops 9% of its shaders but $150 off its $550 price to give a $400 R9 290. To be fair, even at $550 the full Hawaii could fill in this spot. The launch was hurt be the poor reference cooler, but the card itself was a beast putting it ahead of the GTX 780 that launched 6 months earlier at $650. It was just edged out by the $700 3GB 780 Ti by 12% or so that launched shortly after it, but was still only 57% of the price. It wasn't launch that made this card excellent though, it was the legs it had. It's competition kept dropping, and people started talking about FineWine.

Radeon 9500 - GPU manufacturers hate this one simple trick...

I actually got one of those 8800 GTs (single slot cooler! PNY!) at a Best Buy in college at that price, and was ecstatic about the deal as much as the card itself. I only snagged it by reading the circulars (remember being excited for retailer ads in papers?), calling around (yes, dialing a number and speaking to someone), finding the only location to still have stock an hour away, and having the good luck to have a professor cancel class so I could drive there before rush hour traffic. Bang for buck of that degree is as likely to come back as, well, reading newspaper circulars and calling stores directly to check on stock for you...

Also, I'll allow myself to be a little pedantic and say that it was the 9500 Pro that was easy to mod into a 9700, if I recall correctly. But I like your choices more!

 

[Mopetar]

For Nvidia, the 1080ti and 8800gtx are only ones that make sense. The rest look like a monkey randomly picked them out of a jar.

The 8800 and 1080 Ti are stand out products and some of the best cards of all time, not just when they launched but taking history and what came after into account. If you made a top 3 list for each company, I think those two would be there in the NVidia list.

No 2900xt or 3870? No X800 which couldn't even do full DX9.0 (MS had to come up with DX9.0c for NV and b for ATI).

Leaving those out is a pretty glaring omission. The 4000 and 5000 series were good cards, but they were also a redemption arc for AMD.

 

[Avalon]

I softmodded so many L-shaped mem configuration Radeon 9500's into 9700's it wasn't funny. What a time to be alive. Selling installations of those into fellow gamer's PCs got me through a year's worth of college tuition.

 

[Ajay]

2. FX 5800 Ultra

Oh, than and the 5900 Ultra where ridiculous!

 

[Spjut]

IMO, the increased focus on multiplatform and longer console cycles since the 360 era have really skewed the playing field. During the last 15 years, even a "bad" GPU hasn't been a horrible choice.

The Radeon 9000 series was considered great when it launched, but five years later it was considered useless for modern games. Meanwhile, the R9 290x could play all major games for eight years, and some games still support it, and even the universally slandered Vega series remained relevant for longer than the DX9 era GPUs.

 

[MrTeal]

IMO, the increased focus on multiplatform and longer console cycles since the 360 era have really skewed the playing field. During the last 15 years, even a "bad" GPU hasn't been a horrible choice.

The Radeon 9000 series was considered great when it launched, but five years later it was considered useless for modern games. Meanwhile, the R9 290x could play all major games for eight years, and some games still support it, and even the universally slandered Vega series remained relevant for longer than the DX9 era GPUs.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a focus on multiplatform and longer console cycles. A lot of the early hanging fruit has just been used up. The 9700 Pro came out in 2002 on the 150nm node and was 215mm². It drew under 50W. 5 years later we had the 8800 Ultra, and even outside the process node improvements that also had a die that was over twice as large giving it >6x the transistors and the card drew 4x the amount of power. The 290X was 438mm² and 6.2B transistors and pulled a hair under 300W. 5 years after that the top card was a 1080 Ti with a 471mm² die, 12B transistors and was also in the 250-300W range. A lot of the huge gains in the golden days were just moving from GPUs being small, low power single slot affairs to the huge cards we have today.

There have also been big architectural improvements over the years, but the pace of those has slowed down too as GPUs get more mature. You could probably even argue they're flattening off more than they could if AMD and Nvidia focused more just on graphics and not trying to make general compute and AI cards that gamers will also buy.

 

[Panino Manino]

I don't remember seeing any sales figures, but I would bet people that bought an 8600GT in the months before the 8800GT was available wished they waited, and 8600 GT reviews were ho-hum:

DX10 for the Masses: NVIDIA 8600 and 8500 Series Launch

www.anandtech.com

Comments are funny, It's like the same complaints aimed at Ada cards. The more things change, the more they stay the same.



OTOH, 6 months later, the 8800 GT was a bombshell:

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT: The Only Card That Matters

www.anandtech.com

And as always with Nvidia, people complained but kept buying.

 

[MrTeal]

The five worst Nvidia GPUs of all time: Infamous and envious graphics cards

Nvidia GPUs can flop, too.

www.tomshardware.com

5. RTX 3080
4. RTX 4060 Ti
3. RTX 2080
2. GTX 480
1. 5800 Ultra

 

[gdansk]

5. RTX 3080

Hmm, that's very spicy choice I will have to click to see why they think that. Oh, availability.

 

[Thunder 57]

Hmm, that's very spicy choice I will have to click to see why they think that. Oh, availability.

Availability is a stupid reason. I'd rather see the Geforce 4 MX Geforce 2 on there. Entirely misleading and was Nvidia being greedy before that became a trend. A Geforce 3 Ti200 was probably at a similar price and aged much better than any MX.

 

[Aapje]

Hmm, that's very spicy choice I will have to click to see why they think that. Oh, availability.

Even then the 3090 is a way better choice than the 3080 for the worst card since it was similarly unobtanium and you paid almost double the price of the 3080 mostly for 24 GB of VRAM rather than 10 GB, and 14% more speed.

The 4090 actually provided a really big boost in performance over the 4080 and is at least a solid card, even at the very high price.

 

[MrTeal]

Yeah, the reasoning given for the 3080 and Ampere in general are pretty terrible. The further in the generation you go the worse it does get as NV and the AIBs started to want their cut of those inflated prices over MSRP (cough 3090 Tie) but Ampere in general was very solid. Availability was bad, but it certainly wasn't impossible to snag a GPU especially if you would take a 3070 instead of the 3080.

Otherwise pretty similar to my list. 4060 Ti and 2080 for non-existent performance increases at the same price point, 480 for the disappointment and the disaster of the power and cooling, and FX 5800 Ultra for being late, underperforming, and terrible all around.
How they could miss GT200 I have no idea. No full DX10.1 support, a huge and power hungry die for not much of a performance gain at the top, and pricing so bad they had to drop it by 1/3rd a few months after launch when AMD got to within 10% of them in performance at less than half the cost. You know if Nvidia board partners have to start mailing out rebate checks because your GPU is so bad you screwed up your launch.

 

[Shmee]

I would say that the 3080 series and 3090 were probably the best of the Ampere cards. The 3090 may have been the last great Geforce GPU, as later on, they were available for around $800 or less, and had a great amount of memory, good performance, and most of them came with dual or triple 8 pin power connectors. The 4090 is a great performer, but it is only available with the melty connector to my knowledge.

I certainly hope that we can get good Geforce GPUs in the future with 8 pin power connectors again, as it is good to have competition.

 

[igor_kavinski]

The 4090 is a great performer, but it is only available with the melty connector to my knowledge.

Nvidia is quietly upgrading GeForce RTX 4090 cards with a safer power connector

Earlier this month, we learned that the PCI-SIG had developed a new and improved specification for the controversial 16-pin power connector known as 12VHPWR, which has been...

www.techspot.com

Another way to tell is to check for a marking on the top of the connector – if it has the "H++" identifier, it is the new 12V-2x6 connector.

Stupid nGreedia should just label the newer 4090 FE as the Fireproof Edition. But of course they won't. They want users to experience the older melty connector, feel guilty that they plugged it wrong and send it off to some GPU repair company instead of RMA'ing it coz the most common reply from nGreediots on forums or even OEMs' customer support will be, you didn't plug it properly!

 

[GodisanAtheist]

The five worst Nvidia GPUs of all time: Infamous and envious graphics cards

Nvidia GPUs can flop, too.

www.tomshardware.com

5. RTX 3080
4. RTX 4060 Ti
3. RTX 2080
2. GTX 480
1. 5800 Ultra

-A not bad list actually, kinda surprising given how garbage their other lists were.

1. Fx5xxx series - Pure dogshite
2. GTX 7xx- Rebranded 6xx series and the Kepler Arch just didn't have enough gas in it vs GCN and Hawaii.
3. RTX 2xxx - no price to performance movement, very meh generation.
4. GTX2xx series - no support for DX10.1, the first hint of the NV price reaming that was to come (except AMD delivered a banger with the HD4870).
5. GTX4xx series - admittedly the whole series wasn't crap, the GTX460ti was a great little card, but overall it was late, hot, and power hungry.

 

[CP5670]

I agree with the 1080ti, 8800gtx and 9700 pro, the others don't make any sense. The Voodoo2 belongs in there somewhere. As said earlier graphics were advancing much faster back then and a card would be totally obsolete in 2 or 3 years.

 

[Aapje]

I agree with the 1080ti, 8800gtx and 9700 pro, the others don't make any sense. The Voodoo2 belongs in there somewhere. As said earlier graphics were advancing much faster back then and a card would be totally obsolete in 2 or 3 years.

3DFX is neither AMD or Nvidia (although the latter acquired their assets).