Every GPU That Mattered

by jonbaer on 4/7/2026, 8:38:17 AM

Comments

by: mrweasel

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.

4/7/2026, 10:17:21 AM

by: __alexs

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.

4/7/2026, 9:07:53 AM

by: vman81

Honorable mention, the Rendition Vérité 1000 <a href="https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/index.html</a>Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.

4/7/2026, 9:45:13 AM

by: paavohtl

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.

4/7/2026, 9:15:21 AM

by: blackhaz

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

4/7/2026, 11:49:09 AM

by: arjie

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!).

4/7/2026, 8:57:04 AM

by: bob1029

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.

4/7/2026, 9:06:41 AM

by: abhikul0

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.

4/7/2026, 11:30:40 AM

by: Lwrless

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.

4/7/2026, 11:05:39 AM

by: pjmlp

That mattered on the PC evolution, it misses many others e.g TMS34010.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010</a>

4/7/2026, 9:03:54 AM

by: Tepix

Missing the Radeon RX Vega 64!

4/7/2026, 10:03:17 AM

by: kawsper

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.

4/7/2026, 10:25:29 AM

by: finaard

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.

4/7/2026, 10:19:08 AM

by: tetris11

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

4/7/2026, 9:46:57 AM

by: 0x70dd

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.

4/7/2026, 8:58:15 AM

by: rjnaisu

My old GTX770 sitting in a drawer somewhere appreciates this post.

4/7/2026, 11:07:24 AM

by: bdavbdav

Surprised PUBG was the defining game for so many. I don’t recall it being a demanding one.

4/7/2026, 10:55:51 AM

by: Zealotux

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.

4/7/2026, 9:07:03 AM

by: baudmusic

Worth noting this covers consumer gaming GPUs only — the cards most of us are nostalgic about, but a different lineage than what actually drives Nvidia's revenue today. That said, gaming silicon is where most of the foundational architecture innovations originated: unified shaders, async compute, hardware ray tracing all debuted on consumer cards before being repurposed for datacenter workloads. The H100 exists because of the engineering path that ran through the 8800 GTX and Volta Titan. A companion visualization of "every GPU that mattered for AI" would be much shorter and start much later.

4/7/2026, 9:05:50 AM

by: momocowcow

not a very good list, from a historical perspective it’s missing many important cards, as mentioned by othersalso, the gpu did not exist until 1999looks like this was created for engagement

4/7/2026, 10:31:19 AM

by: rythie

The title of site should probably have "for gaming" at the end as it doesn't consider GPUs for compute such as the A100 or the GTX 580 3GB that AlexNet was trained on.

4/7/2026, 10:26:50 AM

by: nickel0800

This is such a cool visualization. Thanks for creating it!

4/7/2026, 10:14:31 AM

by: cubefox

> We build visual stories like this for companiesCombined 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: <a href="https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire" rel="nofollow">https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire</a>

4/7/2026, 9:23:35 AM

by: bobsmooth

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

4/7/2026, 11:13:15 AM

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4/7/2026, 11:05:07 AM

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4/7/2026, 9:30:26 AM

by: Xenoamorphous

Oh, my beloved TNT2 Ultra.

4/7/2026, 9:30:10 AM

by: sakex

Gaming GPUs only which are those we are all nostalgic about, but hardly the ones that matter now for Nvidia.

4/7/2026, 8:58:51 AM

by: BoredPositron

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

4/7/2026, 10:00:08 AM

by: dist-epoch

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.

4/7/2026, 10:14:44 AM

by: charcircuit

Why didn't datacenter GPUs make the list. AI trained with them is such a significant part of computing today.

4/7/2026, 9:02:28 AM

by: u8080

>No RX480Hard pass.

4/7/2026, 10:41:53 AM

by: surcap526

[dead]

4/7/2026, 11:39:33 AM

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