I think pairing RX 5700 XT with Control as the "defining game" is an interesting choice, considering the facts 1. AMD cards were incapable of RT at the time and 2. Control was basically the first game with a good, comprehensive RT implementation that had a massive positive impact on the graphics.
chmod775 40 minutes ago [-]
> massive positive impacts on graphics
I remember the main noticeable difference being ray traced reflections. However that was mostly on immovable objects in extremely simple scenes (office building). Old techniques could've gotten 90% there using cubemaps, screen space reflections, and/or rasterized overlays for dynamic objects like player characters. Or maybe just completely rasterize them, since the scenes are so simple and everything is flat surfaces with right angles anyways. Might've looked better even because you don't get issues with shaders written for a rasterized world on objects that are reflected.
Games that heavily advertise raytracing typically don't use traditional techniques properly at all, making it seem like a bigger graphical jump than it really is. You're not comparing to a real baseline.
Overall that was pretty much the poorest way to advertise the new tech. It's much more impressive in situations where traditional techniques struggle (such as reflections in situations with no right angles or irregular surfaces).
keyringlight 21 minutes ago [-]
The other elephant in the room is the consoles, and even if they're capable of RT they also have to consider the performance capabilities versus visual payoff. As I see it the PC versions of games like Control from studios like Remedy are trailblazers, it's an early implementation (geforce 20 released in 2018, Control was 2019) as the ultra option to shakedown their implementation and start iteration early so future games will benefit, however the baseline is non-RT.
Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.
__alexs 1 hours ago [-]
A lot of GPUs in this list are basically just previous GPU but faster or more RAM. I kind of thought it was going to focus on interesting new architecture innovations.
nickel0800 2 minutes ago [-]
This is such a cool visualization. Thanks for creating it!
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
Absolute nostalgia fever. About a month ago, I dug up an old desktop in the corner, took the drives out and gave away the machine. It felt like putting a racehorse to pasture: i7-4790k, 1080 Ti. It was my dream machine when I got it. Dual-boot (as we did back in the old days when Proton wasn't here) to Ubuntu, then Elementary, then Arch. By the time I gave it away it wasn't worth the power cost.
And that brought to mind my older dream machine, an 8800 GT from generations past, before which we made do with a Via Unichrome that worked sufficiently enough on the OpenChrome driver that I could edit open software (Freespace only needed a few constants changed) so it would render (though some of the image was smeared and so on I could play!).
ramon156 40 minutes ago [-]
I'm still rocking a Z97, i7-4790k and a 980Ti :) I'm still waiting until I need an upgrade. DDR3 is still performing good enough for the games I run.
karmakaze 6 minutes ago [-]
Same. Still play StarCraft2 on a 4790k and AMD R9 Fury X.
brailsafe 54 minutes ago [-]
Hey, I could have used that i7-4790k!
I've been running the worst gaming set up I can get away with, which atm is a 3080 10gb, using random DDR3 ram, a budget WD 512gb ssd, and an i5 of the same socket as the i7-4790k that doesn't even support hyperthreading and can't do more than 4 tasks in parallel.
It's absolutely laughable at this point, but I'm unironically looking for a deal on that cpu lmao, it would be a huge upgrade.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
That mattered on the PC evolution, it misses many others e.g TMS34010.
The 8800 GT is easily the most impactful GPU in my mind. The combination of that video card with valve's Orange Box was insane value proposition at the time.
I'd put the 5700xt at #2 for being the longest lived GPU I've owned by a very wide margin. It's still in use today.
skerit 32 minutes ago [-]
I retired my 5700 XT a few years ago. Wasn't there some kind of hardware problem with it? It kept locking up my Linux kernel.
Tepix 13 minutes ago [-]
Missing the Radeon RX Vega 64!
tetris11 30 minutes ago [-]
I really want to see TDP over time.
If I can at least tell myself that our technological achievements come with efficiency gains instead of just apeing power throughput, I can rest a little better
0x70dd 1 hours ago [-]
This brings so many memories. I remember how badly I wanted an GeForce 6800 Sadly, I was never able to justify spending this much money on a GPU. Still holds true, even today.
Zealotux 1 hours ago [-]
Ah I was just trying to remember the model names last week and this website pops up like magic, weird how the internet works sometimes. The 560 Ti was a dream for teenage me and most of my friends back then, but I must say my Radeon HD 4870 game powered most of my favourite Team Fortress 2 years.
sakex 1 hours ago [-]
Gaming GPUs only which are those we are all nostalgic about, but hardly the ones that matter now for Nvidia.
keyringlight 16 minutes ago [-]
I see it as similar to virtual reality, it was born and grew up with gaming demands and influences, but other disciplines may be more attractive for a mature product
Ygg2 1 hours ago [-]
Turns out corporations and governments can pay way more than individuals.
cubefox 53 minutes ago [-]
> We build visual stories like this for companies
Combined with the color scheme of this site, this might be a cleverly disguised Nvidia ad.
Edit: Clicking through to their main page [1]: yeah, that's definitely an Nvidia ad.
I don't think there's strong evidence of this being an ad. I was surprised to see the Intel Arc A770, a GPU I've never heard of, included on this list. I think it's just that Nvidia has been the dominant force in consumer-level GPUs for a while now.
akashwadhwani35 40 minutes ago [-]
I made this, and it's not an ad.
Chose Nvidia colours, thinking that a GPU website should seem familiar
cubefox 34 minutes ago [-]
You seem to be affiliated with sheets.works, so it appears to be an ad for that site then.
Chaosvex 17 minutes ago [-]
I noticed that the list seemed a little Nvidia heavy when there were absolutely other cards that deserved a mention in the earlier years.
BoredPositron 16 minutes ago [-]
Missed the Voodoo 5 5000 which laid the ground work for nvlink
dist-epoch 2 minutes ago [-]
I think it's a terrible UI - requires
+++++++++++++ 3 different things to see the GPUS: scrolling vertically down to see the Era buttons which then scrolls up and hides the Era buttons even if you have enough vertical screen space, clicking on the Era buttons, clicking < > buttons to see the GPUs of an Era.
I can't remember last time I've seen such a confused design.
46 minutes ago [-]
Xenoamorphous 46 minutes ago [-]
Oh, my beloved TNT2 Ultra.
akashwadhwani35 42 minutes ago [-]
mine too
charcircuit 1 hours ago [-]
Why didn't datacenter GPUs make the list. AI trained with them is such a significant part of computing today.
Chaosvex 17 minutes ago [-]
Because consumers don't care about them, probably. They're never going to be remembered fondly like gaming cards.
baudmusic 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 10:16:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I remember the main noticeable difference being ray traced reflections. However that was mostly on immovable objects in extremely simple scenes (office building). Old techniques could've gotten 90% there using cubemaps, screen space reflections, and/or rasterized overlays for dynamic objects like player characters. Or maybe just completely rasterize them, since the scenes are so simple and everything is flat surfaces with right angles anyways. Might've looked better even because you don't get issues with shaders written for a rasterized world on objects that are reflected.
Games that heavily advertise raytracing typically don't use traditional techniques properly at all, making it seem like a bigger graphical jump than it really is. You're not comparing to a real baseline.
Overall that was pretty much the poorest way to advertise the new tech. It's much more impressive in situations where traditional techniques struggle (such as reflections in situations with no right angles or irregular surfaces).
Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.
And that brought to mind my older dream machine, an 8800 GT from generations past, before which we made do with a Via Unichrome that worked sufficiently enough on the OpenChrome driver that I could edit open software (Freespace only needed a few constants changed) so it would render (though some of the image was smeared and so on I could play!).
I've been running the worst gaming set up I can get away with, which atm is a 3080 10gb, using random DDR3 ram, a budget WD 512gb ssd, and an i5 of the same socket as the i7-4790k that doesn't even support hyperthreading and can't do more than 4 tasks in parallel.
It's absolutely laughable at this point, but I'm unironically looking for a deal on that cpu lmao, it would be a huge upgrade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010
I'd put the 5700xt at #2 for being the longest lived GPU I've owned by a very wide margin. It's still in use today.
If I can at least tell myself that our technological achievements come with efficiency gains instead of just apeing power throughput, I can rest a little better
Combined with the color scheme of this site, this might be a cleverly disguised Nvidia ad.
Edit: Clicking through to their main page [1]: yeah, that's definitely an Nvidia ad.
1: https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire
I can't remember last time I've seen such a confused design.