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My first ever GPU was ATI 9200 I got in Christmas, god I remember the good times playing RollerCoaster Tycoon on it :)
It’s funny how they call the 5870 the best AMD GPU of all time.
They are not wrong, but it’s also their biggest strategic mistake ever: right when they had Nvidia in the ropes and had a chance to crush them with top of the line performance by an insane margin, they decided on they brain dead small die strategy, leaving an escape route for a Nvidia to still remain on top with absolute performance even if their performance per area was a disaster.
It’s just another example of AMD marketing shooting themselves in the foot.
Yup. NVIDIA was able to pull ahead simply through brute force. Sure they ran hot and consumed a lot of power but that was negligible when they were doubling performance every generation.
AMD didn’t have an alternative other than to go “small” die, since they needed margins and they couldn’t execute huge dies given their cost.
Surprised the 5700xt isn’t on this list.
I heard nothing but driver issue complaints during the rnda1 era so that doesn’t surprise me at all
The 5700xt!!! Are you crazy. That’s the worst AMD/ATI card I’ve ever owned. Driver crash,crash,crash,crash,crash. Fixed after 6 months my ass.
5700xt is by far the worse gpu ever released. Its has the highest rma rates and the worse drivers. It is down as the worst possible gpu’s to exist.
What did it do to make it to a top list? even AMD forgot about it.
I remember wanting a 9700 or 9800 pro so bad. But I was just a poor teenager and could only afford a shit GeForce mx440.
This was me, a poor high school teenager with the MX440 64MB trying to play Counter-Strike the best I could. All my rich friends had 9700 Pro’s or even 9800 Pro’s. The evening of my graduation open house, I took $200 of the money I got and went to Best Buy and bought an X700 Pro 256MB AGP. I finally had something that beat my rich friends, until they all got X850’s or 6800 Ultra’s.
It was an HP PC without an agp slot, so I could only get a cheap pci card.
I have had 9500 and softmoded it into 9700
I remember being a kid and selling stuff to save up for a 9600XT, the infamous Half Life 2 bundle. Had to wait for the launch and that’s how i met Steam
i was buying Radeon 9000 pro instead GF MX440, at least 9000pro have pixel shader
I loved my 9000pro, used it until I bought a FX550 which kind of sucked.
FX series worst cards ever, i saw in my life
This was me too, except I had the mx440se. Trust Nvidia to make the special edition significantly worse than the normal model. My mates made the same mistake and we used to call it the “Shit Edition”
Managed to move to the 9600pro after saving my pennies all year, was a huge upgrade. Those were the days…
9800 pro was my first gpu purchase and it blew my mind. was able to play half life 2 with MSAA and everything looked smooth instead of the jagged mess I was used to.
Noooooo! Shoulda went with the 9500 !
My 9500 was a beast. Just a slightly cut down 9700. It was faster than my buddies 9600.
Second video card I ever owned. After my voodoo 3.
you mean a geforce 2 …
The 9800 Pro was the real best GPU, due to the dx9 bug fixes. I also think the list was mostly wrong. I’d say 9800 Pro, 1900XT, 390, Vega 56, 6700XT.
Other points: Radeon 9000, cheap FULL dx8. Nothing else came close. GCN 1 (7970) was crap for drivers, and did not support encoding or freesync. Polaris (480) was completely pointless for 390 users, Vega 56 was the real upgrade, especially if you bought on the fire sale prices. Vega outlasted Pascal. Has HBCC. The 480 was the late to the party card, and you didn’t get the new features of Vega. It was ok, and a good price, not amazing.
For right now, we have the 7800 and 7900. But I wouldn’t count top 5 for being new.
Nvidia: TnT2: You didn’t need a Geforce, could completely skip them until dx8. 470 (best value) or 580 3GB: You could skip Kepler entirely with the 3GB. I wouldn’t count anything else due to bad value or AMD having better alternatives for the money. This is why I don’t count Pascal, because you needed a 1080TI for it to be worth it, and Vega 56 was better for the money. You can maybe count the 12GB 3060, but come on with the 1080p, that’s too dated.
….bruh how did the 9700 pro beat the 9800 pro it fucking came with half life 2 ffs .
It was AMD’s true domination card for the generation it was in. I saw the benchmarks on Anandtech and I was floored.
9600xt 9800xt* my 9800 pro didn’t at least when I got it.
Where’s R9 290X?
The 290X wasn’t that impressive at launch. Ran hot and wasn’t cheap enough to be a good value.
it was faster than the 780 and literally $250 less than the MSRP of the 780 and the 780ti wouldn’t come out for quite a while
I feel it still deserves a spot on the list. Also the heat issues were mostly addressed with Sapphire’s coolers for example. Just seems highly critical to write it off, at least to me.
What are you talking about man it was on par if not faster than the first Titan…
Tom’s literally called it the “Titan killer”. Yes the reference cooler ran hot and sounded like a hair dryer, but the price to performance was amazing. And the AIB cards had some great models, like the Sapphire Toxic.
Nowhere, like it should be. The launch was a disaster because AMD pushed the clock/power targets extremely high in order to “compete” with the 780 and 780 Ti, with the end result being a jet engine in terms of noise.
It wasn’t until February before MSI and ASUS released better cooled cards, at which point the damage from reviews and lack of holiday sales had accumulated.
In the 7970’s case, AMD had at least the benefit of being 3 months early compared to Nvidia.
What are you on about, nvidia had to lower price on 780 twice and issue an emergency SKU in form of 780Ti to be able to compete on price/performance with Hawaii. R9 290 (non-X) was a steal at its price considering how long it managed to stay relevant in the years ahead. GCN driver improvement also added a significant chunk of performance (9k GS in FS at release and around 15k with OC and driver improvements 3 years later). Also, Kepler blower cards were also loud, so the point is sort of not a point at all
How would you have known that the 290 would perform better in 2016?
As for the price cuts, I remember the 780 Ti launch, and the 780 launch was effectively a cut from the Titan.
The 780 price cut was the reason for the jet engine cooler on the 290-series in the first place.
Yeah…This list is a joke without the 290X.
The 290X wasn’t even close to being as competitive as the also-omitted 4870
I miss my All in Wonder Pro. Probably my favorite card of all time. (ATI)
My list:
-
R9 290 - last GPU before 20 nm disaster (not mentioned in the topic, it wasn’t Kepler that got parity in terms of tech process, it was that ATi lost its edge when 20nm didn’t bear fruit)
-
9500 non pro (L-shaped memory bank) - a fairly good chance to unlock it to 9700
-
N21 varieties (it’d be the first but mining craze killed it)
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Cypress - another Khan like success that forced nV to start to play dirty (mGPU frametime “analysis”, GameWorks, PhysX etc), wood screw-augmented “Thermi” flagship in Jen-Hsun hands
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R580 - another glimmer before the big disaster (history certainly repeats sometimes) and an example of quick recovery after so-so R520 (and terribad medium/low-end parts)
-
Feels good to own a 6800 xt!
Ah the 9700 Pro…
I’ll always remember it because I could only afford the 9600 Pro lol.
Not that i cared. I freaking loved that PC.
I love my 6800XT which I upgraded to a couple of months ago. Great GPU
7970 is probably the gpu with longest life cycle from “can it run x” point of view.
Hey I’ve owned/have two of these GPUS. My current GPU is the RX 6800 XT and my previous one was the ASUS ROG Matrix HD 7970 Platinum. Before my current GPU was a RX Vega 64 LC.
The 6950xt I bought at $599 was a fantastic value. While it’s launch price was a little hard to stomach, I think as it started to go down in price it deserves a place on the value list.
Shout out the the Duron line. Suddenly we could get decent a FPU without paying the Intel tax, and that mattered to me back then because I sure did not have a lot of spare cash.
My Duron 900 was a heck of an upgrade from the old K6-400. It lasted me until the Athlon 2500+ provided a similar incredible performance hike at a very forgiving price.