[2kliks] The Greatest GPU Awards (From Past to Today)
Posted by Sevastous-of-Caria@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 109 comments
Posted by Sevastous-of-Caria@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 109 comments
Afro-anus@reddit
If I was picking only one gpu to award, it would probably be the 1080ti
DrCaffy@reddit
That generation was GPU gold on both sides. The RX480/580's with 8GB are still viable in most games today.
Strazdas1@reddit
Most games from 1975 to now, sure probably. Most modern games? absolutely not.
DrCaffy@reddit
*laughs in Mesa RADV*
Seanspeed@reddit
As somebody with an even more powerful GTX1070, no they are not.
DrCaffy@reddit
Frack, I forgot I can't play any games. You got me!
Seanspeed@reddit
I didn't say you couldn't play 'any' games. Christ was a dishonest strawman. smh
TheRealTofuey@reddit
The entire 10 series is magnificent
Strazdas1@reddit
10 series was great on release, but aged so much worse than 20 series.
Strazdas1@reddit
So the one that was one of the worst ones in terms of how it aged compared to next generation?
Gippy_@reddit
In hindsight, the 2080 Ti edges 1080 Ti. Yes, the 2080 Ti MSRP was $999 while the 1080 Ti was $699. But it was about 20% faster in raster and has aged better due to RTX support.
Swoly_Deadlift@reddit
Who cares about ray tracing? DLSS support is the huge feature that made the 2080 Ti last so long. 8 years after release it’s still trading blows with the 4060 Ti.
Seanspeed@reddit
Given the response to the now-deleted HUB video talking about ray tracing progress since Turing, most of this sub. Which shows how out of touch this sub is with general opinion, really.
Also, the 4060Ti should have been a 4050Ti at best, making things a bit less impressive.
Motor_Trouble2280@reddit
The consoles support it, Amd supports it, Nvidia with 99% market share supports it. Intel supports it. It's inevitable that people will start to consider it an important feature.
People with Tnl DX7 cards complained when Vertex Shaders took over too. Yet here we are. I don't recall any "Did Nvidia sell us a lie with programable shaders" sentiment or anyone lamenting the loss of Tnl. Same with Dlss/Upscaling.
Seanspeed@reddit
Way to miss the point of my comment. lol
ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit
50% at 4K, not 20%
mr_tolkien@reddit
The 2000 series was mostly reviled at release for RTX being pointless in the early days. It’s not close to being a legendary GPU. It just aged well.
fmjintervention@reddit
Yep the 1000 series was awesome at every price point. 1050/Ti for people with an old prebuilt they just need to put something half decent in, 1060 6GB for budget custom builds, 1070 value king, 1080 true enthusiast performance and the big daddy 1080 Ti possibly the GOAT. 1000 series lineup was boss all the way up the product stack
Zerasad@reddit
The 1080 ti is leaps and bounds above the 2080 ti in how legendary it was. The real 2080 ti price was $1200 and all it really had on the 1080 ti is undercooked RTX features. DLSS was actively making your graphics worse, raytracing was a no-go due to the massive FPS hit and as an added benefit the card was hot and power hungry.
Yes, looking back the 2080 ti is a better card in 2026 than the 1080 ti, but of course it is. That's not the point being made.
abiotic_selection_2@reddit
2080ti is still very viable today while the 1080ti dropped down a full performance tier the moment dlss 2 came out and is now relegated to a 30 fps medium card with trash image quality.
And in rt only games like indiana jones its even worse
Gambler_720@reddit
2080 Ti is a better card in 2026 than the 1080 Ti was in 2024 and it's not particularly close. That's what makes the case for the 2080 Ti being a more legendary card despite it's price.
Zerasad@reddit
The absolutely most important factor in how legendary a card was is how it was on launch and in the couple years after it. The 2080 ti on launch was a disaster, while the 1080 ti was probably the strongest out of all cards on launch. The uplift compared to the previous generation is also a big factor in favour of the 1080 ti. For $50 more you got 67-80% more performance with the 1080 ti, while the 2080 ti was $500 more expensive (75%) for a 30-40% uplift.
The 1080 ti was the gold standard for years to come, while the 2080 ti was derided as an expensive dud.
ProZoid_10@reddit
People who kept 2080ti for 4-5 years and now 6 years see way more value than 1080ti mainly due to dlss being superior to aa on 1080ti while giving better image quality and stability, nd rt enhances the image quality further
BabySnipes@reddit
Nvidia cards age like fine wine. You know it’s going to be supported for a long time.
Seanspeed@reddit
That's not at all how it works. Nvidia will drop support for older GPU's as well when there's reason to do so. Literally no different than AMD.
Nvidia only seems like they support GPU's longer cuz the core of DLSS is simply something that ran(or could) natively on their tensor cores from the start, but even then we see its limitations as 4.5 is detrimental on 20/30 series. And no, it's not still praise worthy that it's technically supported. Again, it just requires no extra effort on Nvidia's part in this situation. That's not really support, that's simply not artificially cutting off support.
nanonan@reddit
The 1080ti is legendary. The 2080ti is not bad. They aren't in the same league of fame.
TheNiebuhr@reddit
20% no, ~40% faster.
Z3r0sama2017@reddit
Was crazy 25% more money over the 1080 for 30% more performance! Never be another halo card like it.
blaktronium@reddit
8800gtx lasted almost as long in an era where GPUs went obsolete in half the time. I know he picked the 8800gt but thats a misremembering of the situation because the extra 50% vram on the gtx meant it lasted many more years. It also ushered in a new GPU shader design that we still mostly stick to today.
1080ti is only good because the industry stopped evolving, never before has the gpu before a major tech shift lasted so long.
LittlebitsDK@reddit
1080 TI was good because it had amazing performance, loads of VRAM and a good price to boot... After that the prices went further to hell with each generation
Valoneria@reddit
I remember the announced MSRP of the 3000 series was pretty amazing as well.
Sad thing we never really got to see it
diskowmoskow@reddit
For me they are GTX 1060 and RX 480, still serving in many builds.
ThankGodImBipolar@reddit
980Ti walked so 1080Ti could run
rekcats@reddit
Guy yapped a lot. tl;dr Nvidia 1080ti & AMD rx480
Seanspeed@reddit
Man some of y'alls attention spans really are just gone, huh?
kwirky88@reddit
I don’t watch the videos because I can read an article at 6x the speed of someone talking.
Seanspeed@reddit
Yes, but there's not always a corresponding article, is there?
Sounds like you just wanted some quick 'TOP 10' video that just blows through things to see if your opinion matches with theirs instead of actually caring about how somebody arrives at their opinions and maybe understanding the whole video was clearly just a way to have a bit of nostalgic fun reminiscing about some of the great GPU's of the past.
Strazdas1@reddit
and that usually means its not worth watching as anything more than second window background noise.
Seanspeed@reddit
Way to keep proving that y'all didn't understand what this video really was.
3kliksphilip@reddit
It's just nice to see a video of mine posted on reddit for once. But looking at the comments, it doesn't seem like anybody's bothered watching it, but it has started a discussion surrounding the title of the video. Which is good!
Once Reddit's numerous AI profiles can summarise the video posted I'm hoping for more relevant discussion about the video itself ;)
babautz@reddit
Wait a minute, you aren't 2kliksphilip, you phony!
42LSx@reddit
No, you're just proving your projection. You couldn't fully read a single sentence.
If you actually read the post you answered to, you would notice that this person really doesn't sound like they would want a different VIDEO.
Seanspeed@reddit
Given each post I responded to was only max one sentence long, I assure you I had no problems here. I'm no Ernest Hemingway, but I did pass first grade with flying colors.
Ah my bad, I get it. They are mad at this video, not because they were 'yapping', but because it was simply a video at all. And that there should never be any excuse to produce any kind of information content in video form ever, because it's inherently bad and too slow to consume.
That seems like a much more reasonable argument....
42LSx@reddit
This might be (it probably isn't though), but you couldn't parse them because of your shot attention span.
WD40ContactCleaner@reddit
For me its 1080ti nd the RADEON 9800
Seanspeed@reddit
Anybody not naming 8800GT/GTS/GTX are just showing their age or that they only got into PC gaming later.
Dstln@reddit
The gts 320 was not good
Plenty of earlier goat cards, you're showing your age by saying that
WD40ContactCleaner@reddit
Yeah my first "graphics card" was some SiS card which I had to paid with an mpeg card for gaming and movies lol. Also when I meant Radeon 9800 I meant the ATi Radeon 9800 not the AMD Radeon
Blue-150@reddit
Ya that felt like a 5 page email with a summary at the end.
Fr0stCy@reddit
I will always pay respects to the GTX 980 Ti and its bigger brother the Quadro M6000. Maxwell was still stuck on 28nm, the third GPU architecture to do so (after the Kepler pair of 600 and 700 series). But they managed to squeeze so much power efficiency and performance out of the same design that it was shocking. Not to mention being the last nvidia cards to have the DVI-I port allowing for native analog display hookups for CRTs. Good memories,
Honorable mention goes to the GTX Titan Black of the Kepler generation. The truly “do everything” cars from HPC applications to gaming to CAD. No compromises anywhere.
GenZia@reddit
The only reason Maxwell is heralded as the champion is because GCN couldn't scale on 28nm and anything larger than Tahiti (a.k. Hawaii, Fiji) just wasn't supposed to be on 28nm.
Not many people today realize but Maxwell was meant to be on the ill-fated TSMC 20nm. Same goes to AMD's entire Volcanic (R9-200) and Pirate Islands (R9-300, Fury) line-up.
Even when AMD moved GCN (Polaris) to FinFET (Samsung/GloFo 14nm), it still couldn't break the 1.5 GHz barrier (on air). Meanwhile, Maxwell (in the guise of Pascal) had no trouble pushing nearly 2 GHz on FinFET.
Navi/RDNA was just too little, too late compared to Turing and the rest is history.
dahauns@reddit
That's one hell of a reason though - not the fact that GCN couldn't scale, but that Maxwell could.
Titan Kepler might have been a portent of things to come, but it still was "only" an expensive brute force solution to (successfully, mind you) eke out the performance crown. AMD still had Volcanic as a competing architecture at least in the ballpark.
Maxwell though was the real turning point, where NVidia pulled away architecturally and wouldn't let up for a long time. A massive increase in efficiency throughout all SKUs (50% on the 980, but still 25-35% on smaller SKUs) on the same node, and excellent scaling to a smaller node when it was finally available (as you said, with Pascal practically being the "tock" revision of Maxwell), both were unheard of before.
Against Maxwell, AMD had nothing comparable across the board.
And at least from the 970 (Yes, even with, erm "Memorygate", or whatever the 3.5/0.5GB issue was called :) ) upwards, the cards held up great for years.
Honestly, crowning Titan Kepler and not even mentioning Maxwell certainly is a hot take in an otherwise well researched video.
ThankGodImBipolar@reddit
No, I'm pretty sure it's because they managed a 1.5x performance/watt improvement without shrinking their node... not really sure what AMDs performance (or lack thereof) has to do with that.
Noreng@reddit
Hawaii was was a pretty significant uplift over Tahiti. Mostly because Tahiti was rather lopsided in terms of CU count relative to SE and GE count. Polaris was more like a slightly shrunk down Hawaii than a scaled-up Tahiti. GCN had a hard limit of 4 GEs and 4 SEs per GPU, and each SE could at most fit 16 CUs. Tahiti, Fiji, and big Vega all crammed the maximum number of CUs per Shader Engine.
Fr0stCy@reddit
Wasn’t Much of Volcanic Islands and Pirate Islands rebadges? I had a 280X, which was basically a rebadged Radeon 7970. Only the 90-series was new architecture.
That being said, you are right. AMD dropped the ball hard on launch and the products struggled to gain traction.
bubblesort33@reddit
I totally disagree with AMD overring good RT performance with the RX 6000 series. the only time AMD wasn't lagging massively behind was when RT was so barebone, it only used up like 1/3 of frame time, or even less. Although, looking back it probably wasn't that bad of an idea for AMD to not do much with RT, because so many early titles felt like RT was really just slapped on to a minimal amount outside of Cyberpunk.
MN_Moody@reddit
The 3dfx Voodoo series still represents, to me, the first real cohesive combination of hardware and a developer friendly API (Glide) that made it the original go-to option for gaming PC's in the mid-late 90's.
When the original Voodoo 1 launched, games like Mechwarrior 2 had to be released in 35+ versions written for the mad variety of graphics chipsets available when Direct3D was still in it's infancy. PC gaming in the mid 90's was the domain of freaks and geeks where consoles often had the upper hand in graphics quality and experience. 3dfx flipped the script by de-emphasizing technical specs and instead evolved the Glide API along with studio/developer support plus consumer friendly branding to push PC gaming into a more mainstream accessible place.
Without the arms race that 3dfx kicked off in the mid-late 90's that forced the industry to become more consumer friendly and standards focused, we wouldn't be splitting hairs over which flavor of Geforce/Radeon is better in the 25+ years that followed.
CapnCrackerz@reddit
The mythical Voodoo 5…
MN_Moody@reddit
The Voodoo 3 was peak 3dfx in mid 1999, but also the beginning of the end with their alienation of AIB's by purchasing STB and doing all card production in-house. Those AIB's flocked to ATI and Nvidia just in time for Nvidia's release of the Geforce and ATI's Radeon chipsets, while Microsoft launched the much more robust Directx7 that made the 3dfx exclusive Glide API a lot less interesting. By the end of 2000, Nvidia owned 3dfx and looted the brand for it's IP before clearing out and discontinuing any remaining stock including many of the Voodoo 4500/5500 cards produced.
SomeoneBritish@reddit
Happy to see the 8800GT get its mention. That thing was incredible for the price.
techraito@reddit
For modern day context, imagine going from 1080ti to 4090 raster in a single generation. Unbelievable performance at the time for a single card.
MiloIsTheBest@reddit
My favourite of all time.
Especially after I replaced the stock SINGLE SLOT cooler that sounded like a dentist drill and kept the card at a noodle-cooking 95C with a ThermalTake DuOrb that was one of those gorgeous copper flower coolers and let the card run full tilt at about 45C.
My mate had bought an 8800GTX about 6 months earlier and he was not super impressed that I was getting basically his performance for half the price (and lower power usage).
Plus the 8000 series was an architectural revolution that uplifted from the previous gen the same way that Core 2 improved over Pentium 4. It was a hell of a time to be an enthusiast.
Z3r0sama2017@reddit
That 768mb vram was sooooo good for Oblivion modding though! I could throw on qtp3 and it was like a nextgen remaster.
MiloIsTheBest@reddit
Oh yeah no shade on the GTX or the Ultra or even the GTS the whole series was absolutely GOATed
makingwands@reddit
Smart move. My cheapo Gigabyte 8800 GT cooked itself to death after just a year, it was so sad.
monjessenstein@reddit
I remember seeing a post or reading an article somewhere that, compared to the flagship or other cards of the time the 8800GT was the best perf/dollar gpu of all time.
Ugazaka@reddit
I had 8800gt SLI that thing ran crysis 15fps!
f1rstx@reddit
i had one after Radeon 9600 Pro and it was absolutely insane how much better it was, especially software - i had absolutely awful time with ATi card and it was smooth sailing ever since on Nvidia
NeroClaudius199907@reddit
Turing is the am4 of gpus
Seanspeed@reddit
Only the super expensive 2080Ti has fared ok.
NeroClaudius199907@reddit
What is okay
ProZoid_10@reddit
8gb gpus are obsolete in 2026 because you can’t run at least high + rt
2080ti is the only turing gpu capable
letsgoiowa@reddit
You seriously think high+RT is a reasonable bar for an almost 8 year old GPU? LOL
Seanspeed@reddit
Still very usable in the latest demanding games without significant sacrifices.
NeroClaudius199907@reddit
You have game settings to define significant sacrifices. Some people will say ultra-high + rt means card is still good. Others will say High-med + rt card is good.
Seanspeed@reddit
What is wrong with you?
I said 'fared ok'.
You asked me to define what 'ok' means.
I do so.
You are now demanding I define 'good', and saying I'm afraid to do so.
It's pretty obvious it doesn't matter what I say at this point, you're going to ignore it.
NeroClaudius199907@reddit
I'm just asking what you personally think fared okay is ... because I do not know.
For me fairing okay is turing being able to play high-med and low rt + dlss q at 1080p 55fps min and 1440p highmed-low no rt + dlss b 60fps min
jedrider@reddit
GTX 750 because I’m still using them. Very good low power operation.
Dstln@reddit
That thing has been completely obsolete for several years, but I love the concept of the 750/1050ti and I wish they still cared about that market and power envelope
Swoly_Deadlift@reddit
I think the 750 Ti wouldn’t be remembered so fondly if it wasn’t for its “console killer” reputation. The 750 Ti was only seen as a good card because the Xbox One was expensive and underpowered.
Extreme-Arm4609@reddit
Personally
9700 Pro absolute legendary it blew people away, that former sgi team are legendary. First, they did the N64 blew away everyone with that, then the Flipper for GameCube were so good ATI bought them, then R300 (Radeon 9000), Xbox 360, then their only mistake Tarascale, kinda it got way better with great mature drivers.
Dstln@reddit
Yep 9700 pro was a great one, that and x800 xt (pe) were a great era for ati
TheGillos@reddit
I've owned many legendary GPUs.
Getting the 9700 Pro on launch, going from a GeForce 2 system. Wow.
It absolutely destroyed everything. DESTROYED.
It would be like getting a 5090 in 2020.
LuluButterFive@reddit
Rose colored glasses with the 1080 ti
It aged horribly and gets beat badly by the 5050
the 1060 6gb is the best of that generation
VillzAU@reddit
1080ti was so good value it made the insane price jump on the 2080ti basically the laughing stock of the GPU enthusiast community.
The entire selling point of that card was it could do Ray Tracing which didnt exist for years after in any meaningful way and when it did do raytracing it was at Nintendo 64 frame rates......
2080ti got burried alive by the 1080ti
If you could still buy 1080ti at that point they basically would have sold next to 0.
I cant think of a single generation where a flagship was DOA because the previous flagship GPU was so much better value.
You could argue the 5090 is the second time this happened. Where if 4090 was available still for purchase they would have sold next to none of the 5090. However both these are train wrecks on account of the failed 12HPWR connector.
Seanspeed@reddit
1080Ti was not the flagship, that was the Pascal Titan X. 1080Ti was a cut down GP102, while Nvidia refused to release a more cut down version of the TU102 at a better price.
work-school-account@reddit
980 Ti: 91.7% of full chip
1080 Ti: 93.3%
2080 Ti: 94.4%
3080 Ti: 95.2% (3090 Ti is 100%)
4080 Super: 55.6% (4090 is 88.9%)
5080: 43.8% (5090 is 88.5%)
SoTOP@reddit
2080Ti is the cut down version of TU102. There was Titan RTX with fully enabled chip.
Also, Pascal generation Titan X was weaker than 1080Ti so it's not a flagship anyway, Nvidia released faster fully unlocked Titan Xp.
Calling 1080Ti or 2080Ti not a flagship because of Titan existence is pointless nuisance, they had almost identical gaming performance at much lower price. For this reason gamers barely bough Titan tier cards.
Seanspeed@reddit
Y'all are getting too caught up in naming instead of understanding what the GPU's actually were.
There is no reason Nvidia couldn't have called the 2080Ti a 'Titan'(especially when the Turing Titan was kind of sold as its own , new sort of ultra expensive prosumer thing). And then made the 2080 the 2080Ti. Suddenly perception of everything would look very different even though literally nothing had really changed.
And yes, I did mean the Titan XP for Pascal. Which was priced the same as the 2080Ti would be a year later...
SoTOP@reddit
That's literally what you are doing. 2080Ti is exactly the same tier of product as 1080Ti was, Nvidia just jacked the price to $1200. Products did not change, pricing did.
There is nothing special about it except massive price increase from both prior generations and premium over 2080Ti. The only thing it had was the vram, extra hardware capabilities that first Titans had had long been disabled, and even expanded driver support that previous Titans still had was canned.
If 2080 was called 2080Ti it would have been roasted to oblivion, same price for barely any gaming uplift and less vram? You could not convince people this was the successor to 1080Ti.
RumbleTheCassette@reddit
Haven't watched the video yet but if the 9800 GTX isn't mentioned I'll know I'm too damn old.
Gambler_720@reddit
What? The 9800 GTX is among the worst flagship cards of all time.
RumbleTheCassette@reddit
Whoops, meant 8800 GTX
PJ796@reddit
also pretty bad because of the huge price gap between it and the GT variant
CptSpaulding@reddit
the 8800gtx came out like a year before the 8800gt. so of course a weaker card a year later was gonna be a lot cheaper. the 8800gt is maybe the goat for price to performance, but no one who was there can say the 8800gtx was “pretty bad”, come on now. thing was must have if you wanted to crank crysis settings.
RumbleTheCassette@reddit
Well fuck me maybe it was the 8800 GT that was the goat.
Omniwar@reddit
9800GTX really wasn't a flagship. It launched what, two months before the GTX 280? It was $299 on release and dropped pretty fast to around $200. I bought one as a broke teen because I couldn't afford a GTX 260.
Udmg@reddit
970 should also be a legend 👀🤣
Seanspeed@reddit
It genuinely was really good for 2014. Remember this was basically less than a year removed from the release of the PS4/XB1 and it was already basically twice as powerful as those consoles in raw performance terms for a mere $330.
Swoly_Deadlift@reddit
The RTX 3080 would easily make the list if people were able to get it at MSRP. It was a huge generational leap.
On a more depressing note as a 4090 owner, I agree with his assessment of the 4090 being a “great” GPU. If you were able to get one at MSRP in 2022, it’s been nearly 4 years now and it’s still the second-fastest GPU on the market and blows the doors off the 5080. Plus most go for above MSRP on the second-hand market. With how little Nvidia and AMD care about the consumer market, I have a feeling that 4090s will age even better than the 2080 Ti. We likely won’t see 60 Ti cards outclassing the 4090 until the 2030s at this rate.
NeroClaudius199907@reddit
It will probably take 7070 to beat 4090 let alone 7060ti
wiz_tm@reddit
3080 should get a shout imo
kikimaru024@reddit
3080 was great at MSRP and/or post-pandemic-pricing.
Nerds might decry it "only" having 10GB VRAM, but along with DLSS2 it is the first truly "future-proof" GPU for the PS5 generation.
Flukemaster@reddit
As a 3080 owner that 10GB limitation was a pretty big boat anchor on performance for some games. There was an immediate and noticeable improvement when I got a (somewhat) cheap 2nd hand 3090 (which is basically the same chip with 20GB VRAM)
nanonan@reddit
Would have been great if they had been available.
coldpipe@reddit
GeForce 2 MX for me.
In my memory, I think it's create affordable class of gpu and helped make 3d acceleration mainstream. Many system builders include it and it's great enough for vast majority of games. Many of my friends had one and we can have similar experience.
InternetAnon94@reddit
RX580 has to be in top 5
Sevastous-of-Caria@reddit (OP)
Thats my personal fav. Arrived cheaped distributed to millions post crypto mining fallout below even 50 usd today. And still crushes relatively modern AAA games at 1080p thanks to hardware stagnation. Lifeline for 3rd world country pc cafes and poor region entry into gaming.
skinlo@reddit
9800pro?