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...
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