Oo, really fast card. Hey. Ow. That
price though. Turning back the clock on NVIDIA's biggest GPU releases, we find
plenty of wins, but also some L's so big
that NVIDIA's own marketing team openly mocked them, which got us thinking. Tear
lists are easy views, right? Sorry, excuse me. Which got us thinking, with
the benefit of hindsight, what were NVIDIA's best and worst generations?
Have you been a savvy shopper or did you throw your money at the wrong horses? If
our only consideration was performance, this would be a pretty simple exercise.
Best, worst, rest. But there's a lot
more to delighting gamers than frames per second. So, as we make our way
through 17 generations of NVIDIA hardware, we're going to be looking at
the bigger picture with particular attention to efficiency, new features,
notable controversies, and of course, price. Let me set the stage for our
first generation. It was 2003, cargo pants for everywhere. I cracked open a
copy of the computer paper and was shocked to discover that anyone would be
deranged enough to spend $500
on a card that does nothing but make games run better. Oh, how naive I was.
The good news is I kind of dodged a bullet there. To say that NVIDIA's first
DirectX9 GPUs were controversial would be a gross understatement. Depending on
the gamer benchmark, performance gains compared to the previous generation were
up to 55% but could be as low as just
10%. And that uplift came at the cost of
noise. And the pain kept coming. NVIDIA
marketed the FX series cinematic rendering capabilities as CineX. And
image quality was indeed a big discussion point for this generation,
just for all the wrong reasons. Not anticipating that new games would use
the baseline 24-bit color precision mode of DirectX9 rather than 32-bit, FX cards
ended up falling back to the 16bit mode to increase frame rates. The result was
a noticeable degradation of image quality. Worse still, NVIDIA attempted
to slip this little trick into driver version 43.45
without acknowledging it until the obviously lower image quality forced
them to come clean. Additionally, the implementation of MSAA on these cards
was distinctly inferior to ATI's, leading to more pronounced stairstepping
on the edges of angle geometry. To top it off, ATI's 9700 Pro not only
performed better, but came out earlier and was the same price as the FX5800
Ultra. The FX line of GPUs ended up being about as damaging to NVIDIA's
brand as later FX CPUs were to AMD's.
Clearly a cursed naming scheme. D tier.
The good news is that after a less embarrassing mid-generation 5900 series
refresh of the FX lineup in 2004, Ctier,
NVIDIA would follow up with a real banger. The performance gains of the
GeForce 6 generation were outstanding.
The mid-range 6600 GT outperformed the
previous flagship for less than half the price. And if you went from flagship to
flagship, you could double your performance or more. That's right. It
was in 2004 that SLI made its triumphant
return from the dead. Early adopters had gotten a taste of this dual GPU wizardry
under the 3DFX name back in 1998, but it
would take NVIDIA 4 years after acquiring their rivals to reintroduce
this technology to a much larger gaming audience. The competition with ATI
though was tight in this generation. Flagship cards were neck andneck in both
price and performance with ATI's Crossfire offering similar dual GPU
capabilities, though Team Red's solution was flakier and required a special
master card along with a silly external dongle. Furthermore, the best board
partners were definitely available on the NVIDIA side with many offering
lifetime warranties. This has got to be S tier. Moving on, as we saw with FX,
the GeForce 7 family got multiple flagship GPU launches. First came the
7800 GTX built on the same 110 nanometer
manufacturing process as its predecessor, but with a larger die,
higher clock speeds, and graphics optimized GDDR memory, contributing to a
healthy 60% uplift in performance, even if it did come at a higher price. But
then we got the 512meg version with
vastly higher clock speeds and performance and a super misleading name.
Then we got the 7900 GTX that cranked
clock speeds to 11 thanks to a more advanced 90 nmter manufacturing process,
but then barely managed to outperform the 7800 GTX. No, no, not that 7800.
That one. Oh, and then the 7900 was at a lower price. Do we have an M tier for
mixed bag? Um, you know what though?
NVIDIA clearly won every mid-generational battle with ATI this
time around. This was the last generation to be available for both PCIe
and AGP slot motherboards, and it was full of fun oddities like the uh sample
that we have from this generation, the 7950 GX2 that Frankensteined two SLI
GPUs together into a single PCIe slot.
Oh yeah, and the 7900 GTO.
That's right. NVIDIA used to bless us with limited run cards as a way of
clearing out old or not quite peak performance inventory. And in this case,
many GTO cards could actually be unlocked to full GTX specifications. It
was also the last time we saw a flagship GPU offered in a single slot form
factor. And fun fact, the 7800 GTX was
used as the starting point for the PlayStation 3's RSX GPU. I'm going with
A tier this time around. And as for you 7900,
you get a B. GeForce 8 was, in a word,
revolutionary. S tier. I'm doing it right now. But we got to talk about it a
bit more before we move on. First up, a single 8800 GTX was able to outperform a
pair of 7900 GTXs running an SLI. It is
still the single biggest generational leap in performance we have ever seen.
And it cost only $100 more than a single
7900 GTX, leaving the ATI 2900 XT,
absolutely in the dust, crying to its
mama. Its new mama, AMD, who was probably feeling like entering the ring
with NVIDIA, might not have been a very good idea. The Tesla architectures big
innovation was doing away with the fixed pixel pipelines of previous micro
architectures. So instead of separate vertex and pixel shaders, we got unified
shaders, meaning that any one of them was able to handle any type of shading
task. This flexibility was extremely important as GPUs made the transition
from graphics accelerators to the generalpurpose accelerators that power
workloads like simulation and machine learning today. Also key to that
transition was the release of the CUDA API, which is still in use today and
enables developers to run generalpurpose code on GPUs. Less in use today, but
certainly interesting, was the introduction of three-way SLI for
enthusiasts with more dollars than cents and plenty of patience for tinkering.
And if all that wasn't enough, this generation also welcomed NVIDIA's first
GPU using TSMC's 65nm process. The 8800
GT was less than half the price of its big brother GTX but offered anywhere
from 70 to 90% of the performance depending on the application. And this
was in a single slot form factor. It was such a clear winner in terms of value
that NVIDIA has never offered anything similar since. Now I already declared
GeForce 8 to be S tier, but it's worth saying it again. S tier, which is how
you'll feel and look in our underwear from ltstore.com.
Take it from me, I would know. After a wild previous generation,
GeForce 9 was a bit of a rest on the old laurels time for NVIDIA. We went
straight from the largest generational performance jump to the smallest one.
The G92 core that was at the heart of the 9800 GTX, I mean, it was no slouch.
It handily dispatched the ATIHD 3870,
but it was based on the same Tesla architecture and in fact based on the
same die as the 8800 GT, just shrunk for
a smaller 55nm process node, which was
good for a healthy clock speed bump, but only about a 10% performance increase
versus last gen, unless of course you sprang for the dual GPU 9800 GX2
sandwich edition. I guess we also got PCIe Gen 2 support across the entire
range, but it would be a while before cards, and it wouldn't be these ones,
managed to saturate that connection. I'm going with C tier. What was next?
Right. Nothing. All five cards from the GeForce
100 generation, yes, it existed, were OEM only. We've seen recent examples of
GPUs that were sold exclusively to system integrators. The GTX 1065 gig is
one that comes to mind, but an entire generation NVIDIA. The good news is we
didn't miss out on anything because every 100 series card was rebadged from
either the previous or the following generation. You get a big fat D tier.
But ooh, this is new. NVIDIA's Tesla
architecture is back again with the 200 series, but the GTX goes before the
numbers now. Ooh.
In all seriousness though, the flagship GTX 280 and its mid-gen refreshed 285
used what NVIDIA called their second generation Tesla architecture on TSMC's
65 and 55 nanmter process nodes respectively. And they were hefty mamas
topping over 1 billion transistors for the first time ever. This was also the
first and only time that we saw NVIDIA use a whopping 512-bit memory bus.
granting gamers a very respectable 60ish% performance bump. And while the
ATI HD4870 managed to take the frames per dollar crown, NVIDIA's top tier was
in a different league altogether and still hovering around that $500 flagship
price point. SLI had also matured significantly by this point, allowing
gamers to drive highresolution 2560x600
displays. And it was even beneficial for lower resolutions with scaling that
could reach 70 to 80%. That means that
two mid-range cards was a great value option compared to a single high-end
one. I personally went that route with two GTX 260s. I'm going A tier. As for
the GTX 300 series,
but this again, another generation of five cards that was OEM only. thrilling
except that no, it's actually worse than last time because they were all rebadged
from the previous generation. Let's say
F tier for forgettable. This next one
wasn't. The first DirectX11 capable generation arrived 5 months later than
planned, but with over 50% performance
gains relative to the GTX 280, and it managed to edge out ATI's HD 5870. So
clearly all those CUDA cores were worth waiting for. GPUs still use thousands of
these computing cores for everything from rendering scenery to drawing
character models to calculating lighting and shadows in a game environment. And
all this performance came cheap. Okay,
not cheap, but at an even $500. The GTX
480 was priced identically to the flagship FX GPU from 7 years prior,
making it $120 cheaper in today dollars
if you account for inflation. Oh yeah, and it also cost $150 then dollars less
than the GTX 280 that it replaced. It wasn't all rainbows and sparkles,
though. It was also blazing inferno. The GTX furnace, uh, barbecue card, and
thermy jokes were so common that even AMD joined in on the mockery. In terms
of tech though, we got two big new arrivals. First, thanks to NVIDIA's
acquisition of AIA, who up until this point had made, I think, PowerPoint
presentations and promises. No, sorry. Uh, a weird standalone physics card. Um,
well, yeah, that technology runs on the GPU now. And second was support for
tessillation, a technique used to add detail to surfaces that might otherwise
be rendered flat. Unfortunately, it was still early days for Tessellation and it
incurred a 20% hit to frames per second, making it one of those features that
doesn't really run so much as walk on first generation hardware
or TX, excuse me. Sorry. Uh, we're going to go B tier here. The GTX 500 series,
though, was a solid tick in that it focused heavily on improving rather than
revolutionizing NVIDIA's existing Fermy chip micro architecture. This is a
strategy they borrowed from Intel that resulted in lower temperatures, noise,
and power consumption and also less mockery. Performance gains in the 20%
range were a little on the low end, but NVIDIA did widen the gap compared to
AMD's best, and pricing stayed the same at 500 bucks for the top-end single GPU
card. Notably, GeForce 500 saw the reintroduction of the TI moniker, which
hadn't been used since 2002. We're still not sure how to pronounce it. GTX 560
Tai Ti. But we are sure that at the time
cards with this designation represented incredible performance for the price.
Fun fact, if you've ever had the misfortune, by the way, of buying a fake
GPU from a site like Wish or AliExpress, you probably got a card from this
generation with a modified BIOS. I'm going to go A tier. Now, one of the most
notable things about our next generation GTX 600 is that NVIDIA's Kepler
architecture was the first time they tried to pass off a mid-tier GPU as a
flagship. See, here's the thing. The GTX 680 uses a GK 104 chip, but the flagship
die of each generation almost always ends in a zero. And then the higher that
last number goes, the smaller the die and the lower end the part. What that
means is whether it was for cost concerns or an utter lack of competition
from AMD, the GTX 680 that we got was a
lesser version of what it could have been. But if you were expecting it to
come with a discount, think again. To be fair, overall performance was up 20% and
it was an enormous leap in performance per watt thanks to a risky strategy of
dramatically shrinking the process node and significantly altering the
architecture in one generation. And this is the point where NVIDIA's strategy of
differentiating based on features starts to really make its mark with the 600
series. Then we got some basics like support for PCI Express Gen 3 and
DisplayPort 1.2, but we also got GPU
boost, Envank hardware accelerated video encoding, G-Sync, less demanding FXA and
TXA anti-aliasing, and support for the Vulcan API. And that's not all. A
personal favorite of mine was the introduction of Gamestream. RIP NVIDIA's
endto-end solution for streaming games from your GeForce powered PC to a Shield
handheld device. So cool. It wasn't all
roses, though. Driver issues that caused stuttering with adaptive VSYNC were
widely reported. And confusingly, the total number of SKUs ballooned from 15
to 27. And that's without factoring in the superc clocks and super super clocks
of the world. Making matters worse, AMD
sayanara ATI branding took its first performance crown in some time with the
HD7970. I think we can go B tier, but I also
think I'm being kind of generous here. GTX 700, on the other hand, can be best
summarized as more Kepler. Due to the
slowdown of Moore's law, NVIDIA was stuck with the same 28 nmter
manufacturing process and Kepler architecture, but this time bigger, much
bigger. That GK 110 chip that was
exclusive to enterprise compute cards last time around finally made its first
appearance for consumers in the form of the GTX Titan. And boy was that thing
ever interesting. Depending on who you
asked at the time, NVIDIA would tell you that Titan was intended for gamers or
for professionals or for somewhere in between. And it did have two key
advantages over GeForce GPUs. namely, it had a whopping 6 gigabytes of high-speed
GDDDR5 memory and eight times better
double precision floatingoint performance. But then in subsequent
iterations of these Titan cards, those advantages would ultimately disappear.
And in retrospect, I think the Titan project was simply a way for NVIDIA to
test gamers tolerance for much higher prices. $1,000 for a GPU. We said, "Oh,
young Lionus, you ain't seen nothing yet." Anywh who, the definitely for
gamers real flagships for this generation were the GTX 780, which
managed a 25% increase over last gen for
$150 more, and the 780 Ti, which came
only 6 months later and managed a similar performance jump for only a
marginal increase in price. Meanwhile, AMD's code name Hawaii cards were hot
and loud with the bigger issue being that they were plagued by driver issues
and wouldn't really catch up in terms of performance for a couple more years. 7
series then comes away with the score the 6 series should have gotten a tier.
As for GTX 800 series,
once again, it did exist, but instead of
more Kepler, the theme was less Kepler
in your laptop. Dt tier. Now, there were plans actually
for a desktop line of 800 series cards apparently, but they were intended to be
based on NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture, which would instead make
its debut as the GTX 900 series. Maxwell
is notable for a number of reasons. It was the second time that NVIDIA passed a
mid-tier GPU off as a flagship. It was the third desktop generation that was
stuck on TSMC's 28 nanmter process.
Moore's law was looking well and truly dead at this time. And it was the last
time that we would see a new generation launch on a close enough to yearly
cycle. Impressively though, Maxwell offered a 30% performance increase for
wait less. Yes, the 980 was a $550 card
at launch, $100 less than the 780. On
top of that, it was AMD's turn to phone it in with a rebrand of their 290X to
390X, leaving NVIDIA essentially alone at the top of the performance charts. It
was also so efficient that for the first time ever, NVIDIA used the same desktop
GPU dies in 900 series laptops. They had
some interesting ideas for how to use their performance leadership. One was
dynamic super resolution, which was possible to do before, but simplified
and allowed you to render your game at a higher than native resolution, then
downsample it for a smoother appearance. Another was to push gaming on
highresolution monitors and TVs. Less demanding MFAA or multi-frame
anti-aliasing and HDMI 2.0 made 4K 60 Hz
gaming a major marketing point for NVIDIA. But with that said, even the
properly high-end 980 Ti that came as a $750 midcycle refresh struggled to
deliver a playable 4K experience in AAA games. I mean, to be clear, these were
fast cards and shockingly efficient considering that the transistors were
the same size as Kepler, but NVIDIA set our expectations maybe a little bit too
high. Notable too from this generation was the introduction of VXGI, even if
Voxal global illumination would ultimately give way to path-raced RTX
lighting, which we'll get to later. And finally, it's impossible to talk about
this generation without bringing up the 3 1/2 gig GTX 970 debacle for which
NVIDIA eventually had to settle a class action lawsuit. The cards did have 4
gigs of RAM as advertised. It's just that only 7/8 of it was actually
accessible at full speed. Whoops. Yeah,
you know what? It's still A tier in my book. Though maybe not as A tier as the
GTX 10 series. We finally got a new manufacturing node, guys. Let's go.
TSMC's 16 nmter process meant a healthy
bump in well, everything. At launch,
gamers could pick up a top tier card. Sort of. They did that thing again where
they withheld the biggest die for a TI refresh with a very respectable 60%
increase in performance for 600 bucks while drawing less power and producing
less heat. 10 series also gave us our first taste of GPU Boost 3.0, which
could best be described as self-overclocking, allowing the GPU to
scale its clock speed well beyond base clock depending on available power and
thermal headroom. For their part, AMD's flagship RX 480 was the value king at
the time, but thanks to NVIDIA's investments in GPU encoding and the
explosion of online game streaming, it was well overshadowed by the mid-range
GTX 1060. Which one, you ask? Ah, good
question. In another example of NVIDIA using extremely misleading product
names, the 3 gig and 6 gig version of the 1060 have performance differences
that go way beyond their frame buffer size. For shame
three and four-way SLI were dropped, as was SLI altogether on mid-range cards,
but NVIDIA did introduce a high bandwidth bridge as a bit of a swan song
to two-way SLI. Speaking of bandwidth, the new DisplayPort 1.4 4 standard also
continued the trend of catering towards high resolution, high refresh rate, and
shiny new high dynamic range monitors. 4K 120 Hz HDR, anyone? I mean, not at
that time, but it was so close. We could smell it. I think I'm going to go S tier
here. It's just too bad that in hindsight, it turns out that what I
smelled was the wet fart that was around the next corner. Alongside the
confusingly named RTX 20/GTX16
series came ray tracing. I don't know if
I can remember the last time gamers paid so much for so few frames in return.
Remember that really cool marble demo that NVIDIA put together to show off the
capabilities of these new cards. Yeah, that ran at 25 frames per second at
720p. And with these capabilities came a $100
price hike. That's right, $700 for a,
yes, they did it again, mid-tier GPU diet launch with the proper big TI one
coming later. After the huge leap forward last generation, NVIDIA's
performance gains in traditional games cooled to a more tepid 30-ish%. But I
mean, hey, alongside our ray tracing RT course, we got Tensor course for cool
machine learning accelerated features like background noise removal and deep
learning super sampling, which kind of sucked at launch, but is like freaking
amazing. Now, it's kind of wild seeing what a long game NVIDIA plays sometimes.
Ray tracing is still making its way into the mainstream gaming space, but they
were so sure it was the future of immersive, realistic in-game lighting
that they went as far as to change their whole gaming brand. It's too bad the RTX
20 series never ended up being capable of powering full-fledged rayraced games.
Newer demos like RTX Racer and the new RTX Portal look amazing, but they only
really run on newer cards. and RTX Remix
looks set to rewrite the history books for people who skipped RTX 20 series.
Sorry buddy, you're gonna have to be Ctier is what I would say about the
RTX30 series in hindsight, but man, at
launch this generation was lit. Gamers
were so hyped to get their hands on these cards that our announcement
coverage was the most viewed GPU announcement video we have ever done.
The comments were so full of hope. More than double the total transistors and
CUDA cores at the top end. The 3070 was outperforming the 2080 Ti at less than
half the price. What? Too bad it was not
to be. After the initial availability issues dampened our enthusiasm, the
subsequent crypto mining boom completely dissolved. Secondary sellers,
they're called scalpers, drove those coveted $500 RTX 3070s and
every other card this generation to prices beyond double their MSRP. And
there they stayed. I mean, on the plus side, AMD returned to competitive form
and was able to offer similar performance at lower prices, unless it
came to real-time ray traced lighting. And then, I mean, they too were shipping
cards by the boatload to Cryptoarm. So, boo AMD as well. SLI also officially b
us farewell at this stop in our journey, but we got to say hello to PCIe Gen 4, a
stop gap 12 pin power connector, and support for direct storage, which allows
your GPU and your SSD to talk directly, basically eliminating loading times,
assuming any games ever show up with support for it. As for our tier
assignment, I feel like we need to kind of split this one up. For anyone who got
one of these legitimately ray tracing capable cards for MSRP, 30 series is an
easy A. No, you know what? S tier. S
tier. It delivered on the promises of last gen, but did it at attractive
prices for everyone else though, I think
a C is pretty generous. Oh, bringing us to the present day. Technically,
NVIDIA's 40 series offerings aren't all out yet, but based on what we've seen so
far, we can make some pretty safe guesses. In the coming months, we'll
probably see some unlaunches. Just kidding, that was weird. Probably won't
happen again. More likely, we'll see some yes launches, fleshing out the
lineup with presumably RTX 4060 and
4050s of some sort. And we also wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of new
Halo card launch farther down the road, similar to how the 3090 Ti arrived a
year and a half after its non-TI brother. We're going to have the ones
that are out linked down below. Similar to last generation, we saw a pretty nice
40% increase in performance. It's just that unlike last gen, prices didn't stay
the same. They didn't even increase a little. They increased to a degree that
I I don't think we've ever seen before. Like really, NVIDIA from $700 the
previous two generations to $1,200.
I think you guys got hooked on that pandemic Kool-Aid and haven't figured
out that outside of the really wacky buyers who have always existed buying
Titan Z's and the like. Gamers are not going to spend that kind of money to
play video games. Hence, the shelves full of 4080s and 4070 Ti. For their
part, AMD has retained a strong value proposition, but hasn't been able to
match the insanity of the RTX 4090. and
we got to meet a new power connector again. The 12volt high power connector
has been a hot topic of conversation. It theoretically offers some cool benefits
like allowing the GPU and power supply to communicate their power requirements
and capabilities to each other. But uh with all the melted connectors and
adapters that got me'd all over the internet, it's been a bit of a PR
nightmare for NVIDIA who hit back saying that user error was the problem with
pretty much everything that happened, which may actually be true. Please do
make sure you plug things in all the way. In summary, if we're going by the
kilogram, 40 series offers a fine value,
but we aren't. So, Btier at best, and
I'm generously baking in some future price drops once NVIDIA regains their
senses. All that remains then now is for
you to come at me, bro. Seriously, we couldn't get into the nitty-gritty of
performance or talk about every new feature for all these generations. So,
let me know on our forum or in the comments down below if you agree or
disagree with our reasoning. What's your tier list and how does this video rank
for you? If you guys enjoyed this video, you'll also probably like the full
review we did of the RTX 470 Ti. That is unless you bought one, in which case you
might not enjoy that review that