Every GPU That Mattered

It's probably just me being out of touch, but I don't think the GeForce RTX 4000 or 5000 series really mattered/matters that much.

At the same time I'd add the S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200. Both mattered a lot at the time, but not long term.

I don't believe this list was curated as the title suggests. It's just a semi-random list of popular-ish GPUs with LLM-generated descriptions.

The site looks nice, which fools us into thinking thought and effort was put into this.

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.

Honorable mention, the Rendition Vérité 1000 https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/index.html

Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.

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.

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!).

This is a wonderful-looking infographic, but I truly don't think there are 49 GPUs that mattered in the PC gaming hardware space - let alone all of computer graphics. Call it recency bias, but after the Pascal cards it feels like maybe one or two more entrants actually mattered?

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.

There's no horizontal scroll bar, apparently I need to click and drag the GPU section leftwards with the mouse. (Am I old now?)

That mattered on the PC evolution, it misses many others e.g TMS34010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

Matrox needs a mention somewhere. GPUs do raster too, and theirs optimized for an entirely different market.

I have a strong feeling that this website was designed by Claude Code using the /frontend-design skill.

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

Missing the Radeon RX Vega 64!

I don't think much of the "defining game" thing. Many of them feel like they're just thrown in as a big game at the time - Diablo 2 is an amazing game, and was very popular, but it wasn't fully 3D and the resolution was so limited I don't think there was usually a need to buy a new video card to play it (in fact I think it might have been just fine in software most of the time).

> Apple chose the Rage 128 [Pro] for the original iMac G3, making it the most popular Mac GPU of its era.

This is misleadingly-worded because the original iMac had a 3D RAGE ⅡC, the five-colors models had 3D RAGE Pro, and the slot-loading models had the earlier RAGE 128 VR.

Yes those are all confusingly named by ATi :p

But based on the timeline and features mentioned, they're specifically talking about this one and not any of the earlier chips in the RAGE family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Rage#Rage_128_Pro_/_Rage_F...

iMacs didn't ship with RAGE 128 Pro until the year-2000 Indigo & DV models, by which time the RAGE 128 Pro was already 11 months old: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac//faq/imac-g3-video-p...

Well my 9070 XT made the list; I've been quite happy with it, great performance with paying the Nvidia tax.

RIP my Radeon 7500 from high school though, that was always a budget card, and we all had them but wanted the 9700. Couldn't beat the box are from that era though: https://www.ebay.com/itm/206159283550

Rx580 is on there, but not the R9 290. I’m not sure where the Rx500 series actually pushed technology forward. They always seemed like the AMD budget line. And if 580 is important, why not the 590 or the 570?

Few of the “pre-GPU” graphics accelerators that seem to have mattered are here. The ViRGE. The Mach32 and Mach64. The Trident cards, like the TGUI9440. Yet the Voodoo often isn’t considered a GPU and is on the list.

We had the Riva TNT2 in our family computer, so that was fun to see that again, I think it was paired with an AMD K6-2 chip.

One day one of my friends from school wanted to optimize airflow in our computer, and re-did the cabling, but he managed to block the CPU-fan from spinning. I am not sure how, but we didn't realise it for a couple of months.

When I got my own PC, it had an AMD Barton chip, and it allowed me to play Half-Life 2.

I don't understand this - where's Trident VGA?

Awwww..., this brings so many memories. I had almost all of the early ones: Voodoo 2, Riva TNT2, then GeForce 3 (I think...). Then I switched to laptops and didn't have a discrete graphics till last year when I started playing with LLMs locally. So basically I jumped from GeForce 3 to RTX 3090 :) Thank you for bringing those memories back!

Fails to mention any TBDR-based GPU at all. Do PowerVR and Qualcomm not exist? Or hell, Apple?

I had the Voodoo 1 with VGA passthrough from the 2D card. When you loaded a game you'd head a little clunk from a relay on the Voodoo taking over the VGA signal and you knew you were about to have a good time. Doesn't seem that long ago!

I'd be really interested to see SGI on this chart. When did consumer hardware exceed what you could do on an SGI box?

I think Sun and HP had some 3d capabilities, but it was mostly aimed at engineering/CAD

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.

Missed the Voodoo 5 5000 which laid the ground work for nvlink

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.

Compute stopped behaving like a consumer good and started behaving like an infrastructure; the prices went from competitive cycles to higher while the performance kept compounding and that’s usually what happens when something becomes a bottleneck for entire industries and not just for end users so the gap between what people use and what’s at the frontier says it all.

The Nvidia NV1 mattered even if it was a misstep.

I'd say Voodoo 3 mattered because it killed 3dfx.

And the Matrox Parhelia mattered for much the same reason.

I have fond memories of lending a Voodoo 2 from a friend when I was moving from a 486 to a K6 based system component by component. At that time I was still using my old ISA VGA card, which meant 2D performance was horrible, and I couldn't really watch videos on that thing - but thanks to the Voodoo I could play Unreal Tournament without problems.

I don't see my first GPU on there, it was the humble GeForce4 MX440. It could run almost any game I cared about for a surprisingly long time, even if it's not a true modern card. These days almost all my machines are on iGPUs baked into the CPU. There's way less fun for me, but they are a lot more compact at least.

> 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.

1: https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire

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.

Missing the Rage Fury Maxx, finest welding job by the boffins at ATI, severely hampered by software support.

I wouldn't call a card like the 5080 important. It was incremental compared to the previous generation, a poor value for money, and was awkwardly placed - being very cut down compared to the 90 class of that generation - significantly more than earlier generations.

I was so sad when I retired my 1060 6GB. That thing served me well for almost a decade.

The 9400 GT mattered to me as it was my first gpu. Had bought NFS Carbon only to find that the home pc only had a CD drive not DVD lol, so finally with that drive upgrade also came the 9400 GT and fun ensued.

Not including the Diamond Monster Fusion, the first 2D/3D card, is a glaring omission.

not a very good list, from a historical perspective it’s missing many important cards, as mentioned by others

also, the gpu did not exist until 1999

looks like this was created for engagement