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6800xt better than 290x?
9800 XT was, methinks, the first ($/€)500 AMD card ever and I remember it was the thing to have in 2003. If I remember correctly, there was a HL2 bundle with some manufacturers. Longevity wise it doesn’t come close to the modern cards but back then it was a beast that served me until the pci-e switch.
Where’s gcn’s last consumer breath big daddy vega??
Surprised the 5700xt isn’t on this list.
5700xt is by far the worse gpu ever released. Its has the highest rma rates and the worse drivers. It is down as the worst possible gpu’s to exist.
I heard nothing but driver issue complaints during the rnda1 era so that doesn’t surprise me at all
What did it do to make it to a top list? even AMD forgot about it.
The 5700xt!!! Are you crazy. That’s the worst AMD/ATI card I’ve ever owned. Driver crash,crash,crash,crash,crash. Fixed after 6 months my ass.
I remember wanting a 9700 or 9800 pro so bad. But I was just a poor teenager and could only afford a shit GeForce mx440.
i was buying Radeon 9000 pro instead GF MX440, at least 9000pro have pixel shader
I loved my 9000pro, used it until I bought a FX550 which kind of sucked.
FX series worst cards ever, i saw in my life
This was me too, except I had the mx440se. Trust Nvidia to make the special edition significantly worse than the normal model. My mates made the same mistake and we used to call it the “Shit Edition”
Managed to move to the 9600pro after saving my pennies all year, was a huge upgrade. Those were the days…
My 9500 was a beast. Just a slightly cut down 9700. It was faster than my buddies 9600.
Second video card I ever owned. After my voodoo 3.
It was an HP PC without an agp slot, so I could only get a cheap pci card.
This was me, a poor high school teenager with the MX440 64MB trying to play Counter-Strike the best I could. All my rich friends had 9700 Pro’s or even 9800 Pro’s. The evening of my graduation open house, I took $200 of the money I got and went to Best Buy and bought an X700 Pro 256MB AGP. I finally had something that beat my rich friends, until they all got X850’s or 6800 Ultra’s.
9800 pro was my first gpu purchase and it blew my mind. was able to play half life 2 with MSAA and everything looked smooth instead of the jagged mess I was used to.
Noooooo! Shoulda went with the 9500 !
you mean a geforce 2 …
The 9800 Pro was the real best GPU, due to the dx9 bug fixes. I also think the list was mostly wrong. I’d say 9800 Pro, 1900XT, 390, Vega 56, 6700XT.
Other points: Radeon 9000, cheap FULL dx8. Nothing else came close. GCN 1 (7970) was crap for drivers, and did not support encoding or freesync. Polaris (480) was completely pointless for 390 users, Vega 56 was the real upgrade, especially if you bought on the fire sale prices. Vega outlasted Pascal. Has HBCC. The 480 was the late to the party card, and you didn’t get the new features of Vega. It was ok, and a good price, not amazing.
For right now, we have the 7800 and 7900. But I wouldn’t count top 5 for being new.
Nvidia: TnT2: You didn’t need a Geforce, could completely skip them until dx8. 470 (best value) or 580 3GB: You could skip Kepler entirely with the 3GB. I wouldn’t count anything else due to bad value or AMD having better alternatives for the money. This is why I don’t count Pascal, because you needed a 1080TI for it to be worth it, and Vega 56 was better for the money. You can maybe count the 12GB 3060, but come on with the 1080p, that’s too dated.
I have had 9500 and softmoded it into 9700
I remember being a kid and selling stuff to save up for a 9600XT, the infamous Half Life 2 bundle. Had to wait for the launch and that’s how i met Steam
….bruh how did the 9700 pro beat the 9800 pro it fucking came with half life 2 ffs .
9600xt 9800xt* my 9800 pro didn’t at least when I got it.
It was AMD’s true domination card for the generation it was in. I saw the benchmarks on Anandtech and I was floored.
It’s funny how they call the 5870 the best AMD GPU of all time.
They are not wrong, but it’s also their biggest strategic mistake ever: right when they had Nvidia in the ropes and had a chance to crush them with top of the line performance by an insane margin, they decided on they brain dead small die strategy, leaving an escape route for a Nvidia to still remain on top with absolute performance even if their performance per area was a disaster.
It’s just another example of AMD marketing shooting themselves in the foot.
AMD didn’t have an alternative other than to go “small” die, since they needed margins and they couldn’t execute huge dies given their cost.
Yup. NVIDIA was able to pull ahead simply through brute force. Sure they ran hot and consumed a lot of power but that was negligible when they were doubling performance every generation.
Where’s R9 290X?
The 290X wasn’t that impressive at launch. Ran hot and wasn’t cheap enough to be a good value.
I feel it still deserves a spot on the list. Also the heat issues were mostly addressed with Sapphire’s coolers for example. Just seems highly critical to write it off, at least to me.
it was faster than the 780 and literally $250 less than the MSRP of the 780 and the 780ti wouldn’t come out for quite a while
What are you talking about man it was on par if not faster than the first Titan…
Tom’s literally called it the “Titan killer”. Yes the reference cooler ran hot and sounded like a hair dryer, but the price to performance was amazing. And the AIB cards had some great models, like the Sapphire Toxic.
Yeah…This list is a joke without the 290X.
The 290X wasn’t even close to being as competitive as the also-omitted 4870
Nowhere, like it should be. The launch was a disaster because AMD pushed the clock/power targets extremely high in order to “compete” with the 780 and 780 Ti, with the end result being a jet engine in terms of noise.
It wasn’t until February before MSI and ASUS released better cooled cards, at which point the damage from reviews and lack of holiday sales had accumulated.
In the 7970’s case, AMD had at least the benefit of being 3 months early compared to Nvidia.
What are you on about, nvidia had to lower price on 780 twice and issue an emergency SKU in form of 780Ti to be able to compete on price/performance with Hawaii. R9 290 (non-X) was a steal at its price considering how long it managed to stay relevant in the years ahead. GCN driver improvement also added a significant chunk of performance (9k GS in FS at release and around 15k with OC and driver improvements 3 years later). Also, Kepler blower cards were also loud, so the point is sort of not a point at all
How would you have known that the 290 would perform better in 2016?
As for the price cuts, I remember the 780 Ti launch, and the 780 launch was effectively a cut from the Titan.
The 780 price cut was the reason for the jet engine cooler on the 290-series in the first place.
No RX 580?
It was a refresh of the 480, it didn’t stand out as game changing following it’s predecessor.
Personally, all time means amd stop making gpus
The 7900xtx is a marvel of technology today
The midrange 6800xt still holds its own
290 was an amazing card as I did run bf4 with eyefinity and pushed 100fps with Mantle.
good days.I miss the days when a great card could cost below $500 and a good card below $200
external power and active cooling make them all terrible
I had a 9200, 9800pro, 1950pro, hd4850, 280x, now 6800XT
I’ve had a Rage, X1300 PCI (not PCI-E. Weird little card.), HD3450M, HD4850, HD5870M, R9 390 x2 in crossfire, Vega 56, 6700XT, and now 7900 XTX. I feel old.
I would chosen the 4870 over the 5870. The 5870 just was continuation of the 4870, which really was the generation that pulled Radeon from the disaster that was the HD 2000/3000 series.
The HD3750 was fantastic, price to performance was excellent. The HD4870 was the return to high end performance. I was building and upgrading a lot of PC’s back then. Loved the AMD line up to the HD6000 line. It kind of fell off after that.
That was my thought, the HD4000 cards were a much bigger deal when they came out. The reasoning they have is weird too, they said the 4870 fell short because it didn’t beat the 280 but then talked about how the 5870 was great despite not beating the 480. They were both great cards but the 4870 marked a return to competitiveness for Radeon.
Not seeing the Rx 580 and the Rx 6700xt is a joke
7970 should’ve been #2 or #1 IMO. It was their greatest GPU in terms of overclockability. It launched at 925MHz. My reference one clocked to 1.3GHz on the stock cooler (40% OC) and ram also went to the moon (not too far though, e.g. it gained perf, not lost it due to ECC like some people do). Loud but fast. It was faster than the next generation from Nvidia lmao.
Sure it was a golden sample but damn it was insane to get that much performance for free.
not to mention you can just unlock the 7950
phenomenal card…i went back to buy one last year for my period-correct rig, ditto for the 8800 GTX
7950 was also a great card, save the money, unlock it and they also can OC very well.