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Noticed a small typo when you introduced the 500 series, date range and architecture is shared from Tesla but should say Fermi. And you mentioned the 900 series introduced Maxwell which isn't actually true as the 750/ti introduced it before the launch of the 900 series and at the time they were swooped up by miners for their increased performance per watt over previous gen.
the 1080ti can even compete in RT performance with the current console... it's crazy. sadly most modern games don't support rt on the 10 series anymore, it would be cool simply as a fun curiosity to test the 1080ti with newer RT games
GTX 1080Ti hands down the best card Nvidia has ever made that lasted well into the current generation and the price to performance ratio was good value.
Indeed , I bought a 1070 ti second hand ( after my 1060 fried ) about 5 years ago and she is still doing me really well , only reason I would want to upgrade is for RTX... or maybe 4k gaming but eh not now , first need that 4k screen
In theory, a 3080Ti around 700 dollars or 800 that a friend bought a long time ago is just as good or better value thanks to well made DLSS and CUDA cores.
I built my new PC last month for myself with an RTX 3090, and build a good enough PC for my brother who games in 1080p. The 1080ti FE was handed down to him (along with an i7 4930k), and it continues to casually play everything amazingly well. best value for a card ever, 6 years old and it'll still be good enough for a few more years
im looking to upgrade and the only reason im not getting a 1080ti is because people are way overpricing it even on 2nd hand market. Its listed the same price and sometimes even more expensive than a used 3060ti
@@ponkotuu yeah, i went with a 3070 for the same reason. $320 canadian average on fb marketplace while you can get a 3060 (sometimes a ti if it's a good deal) for less, which has rtx and all the bells and whistles. just ended up coughing up the extra $50 for a 3070 since i might as well at that price difference. ridiculous second hand.
8800 GTX and the 1080Ti were both era defining cards that had an amazing and long lasting impact. And the performance came out of nowhere and moved the game on big time. My first Nvidia GPU was a brand new TNT2 ultra. I miss those days. I enjoyed this, a new GPU launch has always been exciting. I still remember when the GeForce 256 came out, that was impressive. I am hoping for an ATI/AMD equivalent video ;)
@@phoenixrising4995 Hd 7000 series was brilliant. My first ATI card was a 9700 Pro which was equally awesome. I’ve still got a few HD cards, a pair of 6970’s, a 5970, 5870 etc etc…that was such a great time!
lol I went from a TNT2 card to the RTX 2080 Super - I was into counterstrike in early 99-03 and then didn't bother with PC gaming again till 2018 when I got a huge bonus at work... lol so I went from a Pentium 3 866mhz with a TNT2 Ultra card (parents dell computer) then 15ish years later I deceided to get back into PC gaming and bought a 9900k and a 2080 Super
I still have a TNT2 and HD7950 but my 8000 series was mobile SLI, I'll have to ask my friend about his old 1080ti if he ever gets rid of it so I can have the whole collection in this comment thread lol
Man the 1080TI was really something else for its time. Even today that card can play anything and refuses to die. I'd comfortably say it's easily one of the greatest cards of all time.
1080 was ahead of its time, and still has practical use while outperforming a good proportion of the RTX 20, 30, 40, and 50 series cards and being less expensive than today's flagship. The GTX 1050 or 60 mobile performed identically go the desktop counterparts. Gamers weren't fps shamed for not being an American with big desk and big electricity. The GTX 10 series was truly G.O.A.Ted
The 10 series was my favorite era. I still remember walking into my local Best Buy back when I didn't know much about computers and walked out with a new $250 EVGA GTX 1060. Little did I know I had bought the greatest card I'd ever own. Also, I just miss when they would make Titan cards.
If only you'd gotten a 1080ti you'd have an even longer reigning best card ever. They pretty much still make titans though with the 90 tier cards with double the ram or the highest end of the professional lineup with twice as much as that for like 3+ times the price.
@@ffwast Why does it matter now? Assuming the 1060 worked for them at the time, why would they have needed a more powerful card, that is now only as good as a 3060Ti?
1060 was good. I was very happy with my 1070 as well but nothing beat the 8800 GT. At 199 dollars you got top tier performance. And it was good enough for years to come. People who are too young to remember don’t really realise how good it was. Edit: seems 199 was not the launch price but it dropped to that a few months later. In any case at that price it was a heck of a deal. Edit again: techpowered up 349 price seems wrong. Anandtech review at the time says 199.
I knew nearly nothing when I grabbed my 1060 6Gb. That thing lasted me for years before I sold the PC to a friend. They still use it. Awesome value for 1080p gaming.
10 series was definitely S tier with the 1080ti being an absolute beast. The 3000 series is a little tougher as the price at msrp was great and performance was good but as we’re starting to see now, the limited vram in 3060ti-3080 is started to pose a threat to the longevity of the cards playing some newer titles at 1440p and higher resolutions.
the fact the 1060 is gonna be 7 years old this year and its still listed a minimum requirement gpu is pretty insane. such a valued card for 1080p for the people who bought it new.
@@joebob2699 consoles have 16gb gddr6 which while being shared with system still could easily allow for 12-14 allocated to gpu when needed. This gives current gen consoles some headroom over the 3070’s 8gb and 3080’s 10gb which have both suffered from vram related issues in Hogwarts Legacy and Dead Space Remake
Totally agreed on all the rankings. I still have the 1080Ti but I've owned most of the flagships in this video. The 8000 series was such a fun time to be a gamer, as was the 10 series. Hope we get another S tier sometime in my life.
@@Koozwad the technology is stagnating. we need a new gpu design to keep pushing transistor count without the need to increase the physical size and tdp
Cool. It's a shame that Alan Wake 2 can't run on Pascal. This is the first AAA title that I can't run at high settings with my 1080Ti. It's not even because the 1080Ti isn't powerful enough either, because it's more than enough. It's because Pascal doesn't support mesh shaders, which is required for this game. @@soulsniper7398
It's so crazy for me as a 23 year old seeing how they went from a card like the FX 5000 in 2003 when I wasn't even in preschool yet to something like the 4090 now when I'm coming out of college. The amount of progress they made in 20 years is insane. They managed to do that much in just a part of my lifetime. Of course there was some short comings on that journey and the pricing recently is really high but it's still very impressive and I can only wonder what new features or developments will come in the next 20 years
Honestly, I have to say I find that the rate of progress in computers and gaming much slower now than 20+ years ago. Sure the number are impressive but in the 90s it felt like there was a total revolution every year.
Probably not much considering nvidia themselves said they want to go the apple route of seeming premium and revolutionary and jacking up prices every time they can, but doing the minimum of effort under the hood. Current RTX40 gen is a clear exemple of that and RTX50 is already known to be an iteration of the same concept, they don't plan on transforming their current architecture to be more cost effective anytime soon. The good news is if people don't keep chasing ever bigger resolutions that really don't matter anymore, mid range cards will deliver all the perf you need to get as many frames as your screen can output. Top 3d games today already look borderline photorealistic if they want to so we're in a good place I'd say.
As a 25 yo, I witnessed the history from 9600gt to rtx40 series.(or maybe 7000 series but I didn't knew much back then and only start to really understand after I got my first 9600gt)
1080Ti is the value mistake Nvidia will never make again. GTX10 was fire. 1080 for $499, 1080Ti for $699 (NV got scared of Vega which was meh), GTX 1060 for $249 and the amazing value 1050Ti with 4GBs for $149.
@@danielmdax 1060 6GB might have been the best price/longevity deal I ever made. I used that card until the end of '22. I only upgraded cause I managed to get a 3060 for sub-$350 prices.
@@IrisCorven This is really it. Sure as a enthusiast card 1080ti was great value. However the 1060 6gb was really the one that sold and it was also great value. There is a reason why it was the most popular card on Steam until late 2022.
Can we get more videos like this please? It's basically a straight up information download and it's awesome. The list of questions and things I have to research after watching this is huge, I love it.
seriously! so much great info in here that helps buyers make sense of a very confusing lineage of products that are so susceptible to marketing gimmicks.
The GTX 970 was, at one time, the most used card on Steam. Many people getting into PC gaming for the first time and basically everyone from casual Pc gamers to value yet hardcore PC gamers had one. Many people would say it should be S tier just for that. And if I remember correctly it was a pretty big sample size.
Still rocking my GTX 970 and still miffed it only has 3.5GB VRAM. Got the card specifically because I wanted 4 GB 🤡 I have a 4060 Ti coming in that I'm pretty hyped about despite all the negativity surrounding it. The card performs almost on-par with the RTX 3070 and it's a huge step up for me 🤷♂
@@OniCr0wawesome! I also have a 970 and am looking at the 40 series pretty nicely right now. Im curious what made you decide that card? there are so many options its overwhelming
@OniCr0w Me too, gtx 970 is really the go-to budget card if an rx 580 is out of the question. I upgraded to 3060 ti since I really didn't think the 4000 series was gonna that much of an upgrade and ended up being half right (4060 ti either performs the same or slightly better than 3060 ti in certain games). Hope you got the 16gb 4060 ti, or not, $500 for that is crazy to be honest
Still uses the thing...and now in serious need of upgrade. Sucks that the current gen cards are so shit price-wise. Honestly tho, the fact that 7900XTX and the 4080 price are neck and neck in my country means it's going to be hard to decide which to get (and the fact that 4090 is like at least 50% more expensive suuuucks).
Can't wait for that one tbh. It's gonna be a sadder saga in places but imo quite a triumph towards the end. Ppl often forget what an awful state AMD were in for a few years back. First Intel, then that secured and ensured, Nvidia... And all but for the extreme edge of the as yet still niche ray tracing, they did. RDNA2 was first time trading blows to the top in years plus they got the past driver inconsistency sorted, caught up re upscalers and etc. I had to laugh when Linus flashed up the current comparison benchmarks where of the top 6 cards AMD are 4 of them, at 4K no less, only the 4080 and 4090 in there and not both in top place either. My 6800XT was a no brainer over the 3080 (and it's anaemic 10Gb) two years ago when the latter cost, seriously 50-100% more, with no availability for months vs 3 days for the 6800XT and how that difference got me the same perf plus allowing me to afford better parts for the rest of the build. Prices rn still greatly favour AMD in the UK even taking their lesser (though still improved over last gen) RT perf into account: 4070ti's £800-960, 7900XT's £890-1050, 7900XTX's £1000-1200, 4080's £1200-1700, 4090's £1700-2490. The first three are pretty fairly scaled imo price/perf fwiw but after that, wtf. The 7900XTX beats the 4080 and has been seen closing in on the 4090 already for a hefty chunk less than the 4080 where premium cards are concerned. I'm not paying that much more for 'better' RT that I'll barely use, if at all (few games I own rn, only as many again foreseen in the next year or two) and still needs DLSS assured to bring back fps from sub 60. The 4090ti I'm sure will be even more an assured perf win for Nvidia over what the 4090 is but at what price... 3 grand like the 3090 was 2 years ago when the 6900XT that matched it never got over £1700 here at worst? Meanwhile, if there is a 7950XTX or like in the wings it'll put even more pressure on the 4090 and still be enough difference to upgrade something else (CPU/mobo/RAM etc) meaningfully. Nvidia are tripping tbh, sure the 4090 is crazy good but that price... crazy bad no matter how good. Sorry if this got ranty but AMD really by this point deserve way better recognition and even praise than the old 'hur dur bad drivers, hot and loud, but muh ray tracing, DLSS is better and some encoder bs' that is still much the norm in many forums. I can't think offhand of any company that turned things around so damn well as AMD actually has.
imho Radeon 9000: S Radeon X: C or B Radeon X1000: B Radeon HD 2000: F Radeon HD 3000: D Radeon HD 4000: A Radeon HD 5000: S Radeon HD 6000: C Radeon HD 7000: S Radeon R 200: B Radeon R 300: C Radeon RX400: A Radeon RX500: B Radeon RX 5000: B Radeon RX 6000: A Radeon RX 7000: ?
Same, but I hope he gets the Tiers / Scaling correctly. I agree with his assessment but not the scores in this video. Here's my take: S = Ge6000, Ge8000, GTX 200, GTX 10, RTX 30-MSRP A = Ge7800, GTX 400, GTX 600, GTX 900 B = Ge7900, GTX 500, GTX 700, RTX 40 C = GeFX, Ge9000, GTX 16 D = GeFX, GTX 800, RTX 20, RTX 30-Scalp F = Ge300, GTX 1, GTX 300 If you see a pattern there you're not mistaken. Always get S-Tier, occasionally get A-tier, and try to avoid B-tier and lower. As a consumer, an upgrade path was advantageous for your from the (2004) Ge6800 to Ge7800 GTX-512 (2005), Ge8800 GTX (2006), GTX 280 (2008), GTX 470 (2010), GTX 680-4GB (2012), GTX 980Ti (2015), GTX 1080Ti (2017), RTX 3080-MSRP (2020). That's 9 card purchases over 16-Year span, not too shabby but definitely not as longevity as a Home Console which sees minimum 5-Year relevancy.
I'm amazed by how quickly my mood can still turn at the mention of how hard we all got bent over by scalpers and cryptodouches with the 30 series, and how Nvidia seems to think that keeping those jacked up prices is acceptable for the 40 series now that the extraordinary one-off surge in demand is over. It's absolutely rage-inducing.
Absolutely insane I remember when i was shopping for a gpu before the crypto craze i think it was a 2070 or 1080 and it was only like 1600 nzd which is like 900 usd. Recently found my friend bought a rog strix 3080ti from the same place for 3300 nzd which is like 2400 usd. Fucking wild
I have a feeling the 50 series will come back down a bit, it’s going to be like how the car market got crazy and is coming back down, once everyone who can afford those crazy prices has their card companies are going to have to start appealing to the average consumer again.
I bought a 17" Toshiba laptop in 2006 with a 7900GTX in it and I had almost immediate regret when the 8000 series came out around 6 months later, the performance gap blew my card away. Love the way you properly captured generation to generation excitement and expectations. Also glad you mentioned the end of AGP support. Last year I built a retro Pentium 4 PC and needed to figure out what the best maxed out AGP card was. Got lucky and found an EVGA 256-A8-N509-AX compatible with my board.
Because all the cards where amazing I think. I used a 1060 untill 4 weeks ago. And it was 250$ GPU 2016. That kind of long terme support and usability was unheard before. The 1060 was the most used GPU well up into 2022 for a reason. That kind of bang for the bug didn't exist before and will probably never exist ever again.
Everything was good on the 1000 series, not just the 1080ti. The 1070, the 1060, they were all high quality cards in their price points. Hell even the 1050
GTX1070 hands down was and still the greatest purchase I’ve made till this day. I’m still rocking this gpu and after 6-7 years & still holds its performance strong. It’s a pity I’d need to upgrade soon to 3070 due to work requirement.
Me too! Just upgraded from 1070 to 4070 Ti last week. The only reason I upgraded is because I bought a new LG 4K C2 OLED gaming TV and the 1070 simply cant handle 60 fps gaming on 4k. Other than that the 1070 manages to play games at 1080p just fine for the last 6 years at 60 fps. I love that card! Best $350 spent on a card!
@@Mojohoojo187 I actually upgraded my CPU back in 2020 from i7 2700k to i7 10700. Sure there might be some bottlenecks in 1080p resolution but I now mostly play games on 4K resolution and the bottleneck on this resolution is less than 10% so I'm totally ok with it and didn't feel the need of upgrading the CPU again this time. This thing still rocks 👍
My EVGA 1070 must be one of the best cards I ever owned. It ran games back then great and lasted me all the way through covid and the shortage spectacularly. I've since upgraded to EVGA's 3080 but I remember the 1070 fondly.
My MSI GTX 1070 is the best GPU that I have ever owned, bought it back in 2016 and it ran amazing till 2021 till I sold it and bought a RTX 3070, now I have upgraded to a 3080Ti but do I miss my 1070 more than my 3070.
I feel ya’ll. 2019 started with rx 580 4gb it sucked went right to 1070 within 3 weeks got it refurbished from Zotac for 175$ then a 2070s a year later and it felt like no upgrade. Then a 3070 7 months later and I finally felt an upgrade but the 1070 was more than capable at 1440p even on games like Metro Exodus without rtx on. Actually the 1070 did higher frames with rtx off than the 2070s did with rtx on. So it felt like a downgrade. Because rtx off on 2070s was only like 10% more frames tbh on that game. The 1070 for 175$ in 2019 would be like getting a 3070 for 175$ today. Crazy good deal
so cool to see the love for the 1070. my "old" rig, which is mostly stuff from 2010, i threw a 1070 in, and it runs 2020 era games great! massive performance, just a stellar card.
Oh man, memory lane. I had a 7900GS and then moved up to an 8800GT and it was so epic. I had that 8800GT for years and years until I moved up to an R9 290 lol. Glad to know that 8000 series was the best generational leap ever, I knew there was a reason I upgraded after just one gen.
I have huge nostalgia with the 600 series. It was the first time I started building PCs for people and I used the 760/660/ti for a lot of my friends. And a few Radeon 7000 cards. Though the peak of GPUs, for many is the 1000 series. My 1070 still going strong bought brand new the month it released. Would love to upgrade if prices weren't insane.
I appreciate you splitting the RTX 30 series cards on the tier list. I managed to get one for MSRP a month after they came out. During that time I had a restock website open and constantly refreshing websites. Stayed up super late nights for the illusive late night/early morning restocks. I even joined an nvidia discord server to stay up to date on the hunt. It was more exhausting than simply buying a product ever had to be. And honestly no matter how good the next generation of cards are, im never doing that again.
I was super fortunate that when I was looking to buy my first PC, I managed to find one on FB marketplace. As much as I would have liked to have built it myself, buying the individual parts pack in 2021 would have cost an absurd amount. But I managed to get my prebuilt for only $1450, with a 3070 and i7-10700F. Having been able to get the 3070 without ant particularly insane levels of stress, I actually love it as a card. It's a huge jump from the laptop 1070 that I was using for a long time, although tbf that 1070 really went above and beyond what I ever expected it to do. For a laptop GPU, it went crazy. Even though it would only be pushing maybe 30ish fps on large AAA games, that was still impressively smooth for how old the card was and how hot it would run. I eventually sold the laptop to my brother, because he was trying to game on a crappy laptop with integrated graphics that would die trying to run anything
i also joined one of those servers and then it turned out the server admin was a genuine groomer acting creepy towards minors so i left. managed to snag a 3080 at retail price though through pure luck, it served me well until a few months ago when i sold it to my brother steeply discounted as a christmas present.
Who ever wrote this did really well. It's difficult to edit a script into a consumeable time frame like this. If I were presenting this I would need to do a 3 hour gamers nexus super tangent focused oh the good ole days form factor. Kudos on the condensed history lesson for builders and enthusiasts learning the craft alike.
Usually not a big fan of tierlists but I loved this video. It was very informative and kind of felt like I was speedrunning Nvidia history. Will you do something like this on AMD/ATI cards as well?
My path was very similar to yours. Voodoo2->7800 (single at first then SLI)->275->750->1060 (6GB). Most of these were second hand so I'm usually a few years behind the curve, hence I'm still on the 1060 but plotting my next move, so currently re-watching a load of videos like this one!
The 6600gt, 8800gtx, 560ti, 970 and 1060 are probably the most well-known cards that were still listed years later as "recommended" specs or good second hand cards. They were all incredible.
My first graphic card was XFX 8600gt. I was excited like hell. The box it came was in a X shaped and with a Green Lantern Dog on the cover. Ahh... those were the days. Currently using 1070 8 GB for over 4 years now...
I had an 8600 GT that was passively cooled. It was a PoS. My 10 series is doing better. I dipped in the middle with a 6950, so I'd be keen to know if that was an S tier generation as well (from memory it was my longest lived card).
Glad you mentioned the 200 series favorably. A number of years ago, my dad got a sweet deal on an Alienware M15X in 2014 and it was the first gaming laptop I'd ever owned. (Mind you, I didn't buy laptops that often) Compared to every laptop and integrated graphics workstation I'd been on before that from the late 90s and early 2000s, it was absolutely mind-blowing to me at the time.
The 8800 GTX will always have a special place in my heart. I remember managing to convince my parents to choose it when we were buying the old family PC from Dell. It was such a beast, had it paired with the Q9300 processor, all my friends had the Q6600 though which I'm sure plenty of people remember the OC wars with that one.
Same! Had the 8800 GT (still have it in original box) with a Q6600 and remember very well when my room mate bought a Radeon 4870 X2 and Q8300 and I out-performed that beast of a card in Crysis 😄 Not for very long though, in true Radeon fashion the early drivers were utter garbage..
Fun fact: The 9800 GTX+ came back rebadged as a GTS 250 - they were even compatible to run together in SLI. This was the setup I had for over a year back in the day... good times 😅
The GTS 240 was the 3rd rebadge I was curious if anyone else would mention it. Since how many cards got 3 lives. Kinda surprised it didn't earn an honorable mention in the video
I ran those two in SLI as well! Or so I thought... I recall checking on my settings about a year after I bought the GTS 250 and found that SLI had been disabled at some point, and I was just running on one card in games. No idea how long that second card was just sitting there not doing anything.
I am almost 50 years old and I have been a gamer my entire life. My biggest wow effect was with the Diamaond Monster 3d 3dfx card and Wing Commander Prophecy. Never ever since that moment there was such a big leap in visual enhancement than that. The Diamond Monster was an add on, you needed a graphics card on top and it cost 380 $ but boy was it worth it for awhile.
I got a 3060 ti at msrp at launch and I can say I'm pretty happy. I definitely agree with the S tier choice. Only $400 usd for an insane card like the 3060 ti
I scored a 3060Ti for close to MSRP myself and the difference in 1440P coming from a GTX 1660 super was pretty good. I can see myself rocking it for many years.
Same, got mine at MSRP shortly after launch. Upgraded from a GTX 970 since it was struggling to push new titles to 144, and the performance uplift was simply jawdropping to me. Max quality 1080p at 144 for most games is no problem, I've been loving it. Might jump to 1440p144 or might give 1080p240 a shake, not sure which yet.
@@YuriZakhaev i’m going 1080p240 rn, got an xg2431 for like 280$ on sale and this thing is insane, it’s ips and has some of the best motion clarity on a monitor out right now
@@YuriZakhaevI know, it's amazing. I went from APU to 1050 2gb to the 3060 ti and the difference was incredible to say the least. I run 165hz 1440p and most games it runs smooth
In hindsight, very glad I bought a 3070 at launch. It was bit of an impulse buy, and I had to deal with some early driver issues (even had a little buyers remorse), but omg, the value and longevity is definitely S tier and I dodged the mining scalping bs. This card will last me quite some time.
Yeah, I'm glad I grabbed a 3080 at launch similarly. Or, well, I put in an order for one at launch and got it like 3-4 months later, but still it was MSRP, and cost less than what I'd paid for a 1080 Ti some years before! (Work with graphically intensive games so didn't buy these just for personal use, and also got tax deductions.
Same. I got a 3060 Ti at launch for $600 AUD - and I’m still rocking it today. Fantastic card considering what it could do, and how much I paid for it. And it paid for itself too, mining in my downtime.
Bought a 2080, it stopped working with 3 months left on the warranty. Got a refurb 3070 as a replacement. Best value i've ever had from a graphics card.
I cant wait for an amd version of this! these videos are basically history recaps and its great for new comers to the hobby to learn and see how things have evolved.
Рік тому
Though it's still only part of the history. The really early days (I guess before Linus -was old enough- got into this ;-)) are missing.
The 900 and 1000 series will always be insane coming off the back of the 780ti. Just being 14 back then, not long having built my first PC and always knowing the 780ti and titan series as the be all end all and then seeing the performance and cost AND power efficiency upgrade for all the cards was crazy to me back then. And then the 1000 series blew my mind all over again. Also can we talk about those early 2000s(the decade) cards doubling performance and halving the price? Some of that nowaday?? Maybe not paying over $500 for a decent 1440p card nvidia?
I think the 2000 series got its fair bump when the Super variants were finally introduced, as they did not uplift in msrp, but they sure did improve a lot on the lacking performance leap vs 1000 cards. I'm still happy with my 2070S running all my modern AAA games on my 3K monitor, and while I do truly wanna upgrade to the 4000 series, I am not in any rush to do so. If I had the regular non-Super variant, I might have bit the bullet on one of the more recent gpus.
For reference I have a 2070 non super and theres no way im upgrading to 40 series with these prices. I can still run any game at like 80 fps at 2k on a mix of medium to high settings
I got my 2070 to replace a 1070 and was called stupid at the time. Well all the 20's series adopters turned out to be wise investors when pandemic pricing hit and my "overpriced" card was suddenly cheap in comparison. Also you hit the nail on the head with DLSS and I happily played Cyberpunk when my friends were complaining about the performance of their 1080's LOL
Used 1060 6gb, 980ti, and now using the 3070. 3070 really surprised me that the frames went doubled compared to the 980ti. All three cards are great in value until now and I will keep my 980ti which I have used for over 4 years. But yeah.. it’s a pity that I haven’t used the 1080ti.
@@llamateur very true. I mostly play Fortnite with some friends and it hits between 120-144 on my 1440p monitor. Obviously this is an optimized game and I’m not running ultra settings but it’s hard to justify upgrading while it’s still running no questions asked.
I also have my 980ti on the shelf, I left it for a 3080 last year but let my buddy use it while he was waiting on a card. It is still very capable at 1080p and even 1440p!
The biggest jump in performance I ever got was upgrading from a Riva128 to a TNT2. I have never been impressed that much by a graphics card again, I think. That card could run Heretic2 in 1024x576 easily! 😄
Mine has honestly been the 2070 super coming from the 1060. Understandably when the 20 series came out, the value proposition wasn't good at all, but I picked up the 2070 Super for 450 right before the 30 series launched, and features such as DLSS have kept me able to play brand new AAA titles at high resolutions without any trouble. I have no regrets.
@@clamhands42069 this going from a rx 580 4gb and hearing my computer turn into a jet engine running things like gta, to finally upgrade to a 2060 super. Its SO quiet.
I waited 10 hours in line at a best buy when I found out they were restocking(back during the shortage). I wanted a 3070 ti but by the time I got to the front the only ones they had left were 3090. Sleep deprivation got the best of me. Ended up getting it and still don’t regret it
Personally, I have very fond memories of my GeForce 6600 GT. It was one of two cards (the former was the GeForce4 MX 440) that took me through the games of my childhood, and by my count was the card that stayed with me the longest. The card itself is now in the box, on the shelf of functional components, having its own special place on it, as well as in my memory, and the only thing wrong with it is the fan that has gone to the land of eternal low revolutions and well-greased bearings.
For all the flak the RTX 20 series got at launch, I think it managed to turn things around dramatically as drivers matured and more games began supporting DLSS and optimized ray-tracing. I remember never even wanting to bother with ray-tracing when I first got my EVGA RTX 2070 Black, as it basically just ensured a cinematic experience. But roughly four years later, I'm coming back to games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Control, and keeping well above 60fps at 1440p with DLSS, ray-tracing, and most settings at or near max. I mean, without DLSS it's kinda of a poopshow, but don't say RTX never gave you nuthin. Also, I got mine for well under $500 right before the pandemic, so definitely no complaints.
As someone who got into the PC gaming scene during the GTX 900 series launch, I appreciate seeing the history of Nvidia's and AMD's cards. Great video!
Would have liked to see 1660 Super mentioned with its enhancements to original. Very great video. Recently inspired to build my first PC after watching scrap wars. Thank you.
@@maxek46 honestly dude. I built my whole rig for £200 which isn’t a huge amount but have a 1660Super and a good build for the price (2012 mother board and of course CPU with it) and all but it runs decent for me. And it’s only inspired from Linus and the crew doing these.
I fondly remember the 2004-2009 period in computing, where each generation saw these insane jumps in performance and value. I kept up to date by reading the printed PC magazines at my scholl's library haha.
I love that you put the 8800 series in S Tier. A friend of a friend was getting rid of a computer he didn't like and I didn't have one so I was lucky enough to be gifted it...for free because he didn't like the pc for some reason. This was the most fun I ever had on a PC and the 8800 GTX he had in there was beautiful. I miss when cool designs/pictures were put on video cards but to each their own.
Seeing Linus go over the nightmare of the 30 series launch really makes me glad I got lucky and grabbed my 3070 from the Verified Actual Gamers program LTT had a few years ago.
I think the 1060 6GB was the best card ever created because it was one of the very few times when a lower mid-range card could max out games released during that generation at 1080p (which was like crème de la crème) and 60 FPS and unfortunately that was the last time we ever saw that again
No mroe art in the world - everything is soulless and sterile now. Most artistic creativity and ancient knowledge was destroyed/hidden by the west starting in the first world war and continuing in the second world war. Look at buildings built in the last ~100 years. Soulless architecture.
Seeing the old cards and how they priced the generations to each other has to make you mostalgic, getting much more performance with a new generation with only a little extra cost and having mid tier cards that outperform the last generation for less money always felt like a real technological improvement instead of maximum greed like today
If inflation is so real, then why are only GPUs affected by it? SSDs, RAM and CPU prices are going down. And that too while providing huge performance improvements. Inflation has always been a thing but the improvement in technology, Moore's law and competitions have only brought prices down. Its all is just an ngreedia shills' excuse to support overprice. cost of R&D and salaries to workers doesn't even make a dent in all multibillion dollar corporations' billions of dollars of profits. a 4090 die costs 300 bucks MAX to make according to wafer calcs and TSMC prices per wafer. and that 300 bucks number from calcs is too high because on the same wafer where big dies don't fit you can make smaller dies like a 4080, a 4070Ti etc. which ngreedia gets "for free" - if you account for them unlike wafer calcs do = they lower the cost of a wafer significantly. $1600-$2000 for a less than 300 bucks 4090 die? just lol. I understand if they'd want 800 bucks for that, max. it still would be at least 200 bucks overpriced. a 4080 die costs 150 bucks MAX - again without accounting for smaller dies that are made "for free" on the same wafer. $1200+ for that? and ngreedia is trying to sell 60-class cut down silicon as 4070ti for 800 bucks with 12gb VRAM, they even tried to sell it like 80-class silicon for 900 bucks at first. 12gb VRAM on 800-900+ bucks cards, Carl! 12gb VRAM... in 2023... on 800-900+ bucks GPUs!!!111 12gb VRAM is fine for 3060 performance level, a 4070tie should have at least 16GB or 24Gb as a 3090. otherwise its a morally obsolete GPU, especially for 800-900+ bucks. the 4070ti is basically a morally obsolete piece of crap suitable only for either extreme budget 1080p monitors, or for old games @1440p. and ngreedia wants 800-900+ bucks for that ridiculous piece of crap GPU with 12GB VRAM. the real problem is ngreedia don't really care about selling GPUs at all anymore. all they care about is selling GaaS subscriptions. that explains everything they do. servers they make can be used for AI/GaaS and bring money constantly also they are selling server time to several users simultaneously, so the same silicon is basically sold multiple times, in contrast GPUs are sold once and thats it. no more profit. so they kill PC gaming, don't make faster GPUs with higher VRAMs and affordable prices and sane gamers are stuck with playing games with morally obsolete engines or on morally obsolete low-res screens, because affordable GPUs are way too slow. 1440p is currently the norm in PC hardware and ngreedia GPUs are way too slow for 1440p gaming, even 4090. ngreedia is killing PC gaming on purpose to sell GaaS that doesn't make sense to PC gamers due to latency. and AMD is happy to support GPU overprice to sell more console chips to sony/ms (+ continue selling overpriced AF GPUs of course). the only thing that looks weird is AMD apparently don't understand that without affordable new GPUs that are way faster nobody really needs new CPUs. they shot themselves in the balls by supporting ngreedia's overprice in GPU space and now their CPU sales are way down. but maybe consoles are just THAT profitable for AMD so they just don't care. or maybe their CEO is just stupid and was blinded by quick profits. I guess we'll never know
Hoping you do an ATi/AMD version of this. I haven’t owned an nvidia card since the 8800GT and I agree that thing was amazing. With GPU prices the way they are, looks like I’ll be sticking with AMD for “ok” performance compared to the big green. I bought a 6700 non-xt after sticking with a RX 480 for five years because of the cost increase. Still, the 6700 is the most I’ve ever spent on a video card.
I've got a 6700XT and I absolutely love the AMD way. Adrenaline is extremely easy to use and brings that old wacky charm to PCs I think. It was a massive upgrade from my vega 11 ahaaha
Same. I have tried a few nVidia GPUs, but have been on AMD since the 8800GT. Rocking a RX 6800 XT that somehow I managed to beat bots to and get for MSRP on launch day. If that card would have stayed at that price, it would have beaten the RTX 3000 series into dust for most raster games with it's value (it sure has hell beats it for VRChat in VR lol yay VRAM).
I got a used 6800 still in warranty for 400€ recently, sadly the games I play have engine issues more than GPU issues, like kingdom come deliverence, but overall it was a nice upgrade from my vega56, could had waited the 7000's but I was also attracted to the huge vram which are very nice to have since I like to play heavy modded games like fallout4 and skyrim (where vram is king)
Yeah even after the horror show I had with drivers for my last AMD setup (290X crossfire) it looks like my GTX1080 will be getting replaced with and AMD card when the time comes. Prices are absolutely through the roof.
Personally I think the 980 ti is an S tier card. Got it on launch and used it until about 3 months ago. Beautiful card. My favorite of all time. The 690 was pretty cool too.
Yep, still running on my 980 ti, and it does a great job in most games I play at 1440. I'll look to upgrade when the manufacturers get back to reasonable prices, but the 980 ti is so good that I'm in no rush.
Long ago, I decided to upgrade my GPU, so I wnt and bought a 980Ti. Two weeks later, the 1080 was announced, and I was somewhat disappointed. The 980Ti was great, but I had just missed a much better deal and card overall. Recently, I decided to upgrade that to a better card. Picked out a 2060 Super (due to budget)...and hovered and hesitated over the 'Buy' button. I decided to wait a week. 6 days later, the 30 series was announced, and I breathed a sogh of relief this time. Then card scalping prices happened. Lucky for me, a few weeks after release, I got in and got a 3070 Ti FTW for retail price. Glad I hesitated this time-much happier than I would be with a 3070 Ti than a 2060 Super...
the 970 after the whole 4gb debacle was absolute KING for value, I remember some retailers even selling it for around 200euros on sale! Absolute insane pricing for the performance. Lasted me till I bought a 3070. Because some games really were starting to become unplayable at 1440p even at low.
just made the same switch yesterday. While the 970 was awesome, its starting to struggle with these new games even at 1080p. Loved that thing to pieces.
I'm still rocking a GTX 1080 and have been pretty happy with it. I was really surprised with the VR performance chart that you dropped. I've been itching to upgrade to a RTX 30 series card but maybe I can hang on a bit longer and see if the prices will get better.
Same here, there's nothing I can't play well at 3440x1440 at 100Hz. I've upgraded CPUs twice (3600 and 5900X) since getting the 1080 but nothing has really felt worthwhile since
Same here GTX 1080 AIO watercooled without dust on filter easy 50c while in furmark I'm going to buy in like 2 months a used 3070 for around 360-400$ maybe less will see what can I find
Something interesting I picked up on was the lack of mention of the 750ti for the 700 series, then the mention of Maxwell debuting in the 900 series, which isn't technically correct. Budget oriented gamers from that era will likely be intimately familiar with the 750ti, and I know I loved the one I had in my first ever small form factor build. It was the real debut of Maxwell, as a followup mid-series release to the 700 series in February of 2014 whereas the 900 series launched months later in September, and was (in my opinion) one of the most interesting cards NVidia ever released. Running a Maxwell powered GM107, it had a pretty damn low TDP (especially for the time) at only 60w, allowing it to be fully bus powered off of the PCIe lane. What does this mean? You could stick it in a cheap prebuilt desktop with no need to worry about power connectors on the PSU. It just worked. It was a single slot card, put out little heat, took little power, and was honestly not even that far behind the 760 for performance in popular titles at the time. As an experimental debut for Maxwell, it absolutely killed it, being a top choice for the budget or size constrained gamer. The fact that it was available at the same time as the similarly insane value Pentium G3258 made for some exciting build possibilities on a shoestring budget, even if those specs can't even run modern titles due to the low core count.
Do however note that the 750ti was Maxwell v1, thus lacking some support and features that Maxwell v2 (900-series) got. It certainly was a popular card though.
The amount of gaming performance I got day one release of the $699 1080 Ti was astronomical. It is definitely the best GPU Nvidia has ever made. Still holding out for another card to replace this legend. Maybe a 5080 Ti or 5090?
Good trip down memory lane! The 8800 GT was the first GPU I have ever bought on it's own. It replaced some ATI card from my prebuilt Dell. I still got that piece of history around somewhere.
Correction: I believe that it was the 10 series, not 9, that had desktop dies in laptops with the same name for the first time. The 970M, for example, was really a 960.
@@SerCommander i had the evga 8800gts 640mb with the g92 chip and it lasted me until i bought a 570 gtx because i was just playing css or wow at that time. I'd say beside the 1080ti the best car i ever bought.
As one of the few people that copped a 3080 FE at MSRP near release, it's been the single best GPU purchase I've ever made in my life having been building since the mid 2000's. The 1080Ti that now lives in my media machine would be the close runner up, man that thing is still killer for 1080p gaming even with modern games and 4K video.
The first card I bought was the 970. Beside the obvious memory debacle Nvidia dropped the ball on, it was a damn fine card. I got mine in 2015 and didn't get a new card till 2022. If I wasn't in college at the time, I would have loved to pick up a 1080 but I was broke then (as I am now still lol).
im currently using a 970 STILL after buying it around the same time lol. its been a fucking TANK of a card for what it is. i have a 3080 sitting on my shelf waiting on the rest of my parts to be ordered. gonna have to give this 970 a viking funeral or something when my new pc gets built.
@@patrickkilduff5272 lol are you trolling? the 970 came out a year after your 290x, which was about 9 or 10 years ago btw thats a totally reasonable first card at the time when it only cost like 350 new.
Same, still very happy about the 1660 Super. It's power efficient and offers good bang for buck. That said, the 16 series didn't offer anything new or interesting all things considered, plus it's only the bottom half of the series so it's hard to judge
This really highlights how many Ws NVidia took over the years against ATi (and later AMD). Up to the 10 series, NVidia delivered so much performance every few years that gave a reason why people have felt like there wasn't even competition. Since the pandemic and the scalping situation last year, the market is a mess now. But I'll still fondly remember starting with the old Geforce 2 MX400.
I mean, while Nvidia continues to be a piece of shit, even the 20 series cards outperformed AMD's cards as well as the 30 and current 40 series. They're still taking Ws, just not on price. Because fuck them for that crazy 40 series hike. That being said, I always used to Game on ATI. I'll never forget how both excited and disappointed I was with ATI's All in Wonder cards. It was awesome being able to capture the video from my cable box to record Anime Unleased from TechTV. But the gaming performance wasn't the best. I ended up buying a second hand Nvidia 6600 from ebay. It ran amazingly well... Until it didn't. It played Morrowind with all the mods perfectly, but Oblivion... It did some of the funkiest shit to the graphics after a while. It'd start glitching out anything with a vertex point until I shut the system down for a bit. In hindsight, it could have just had bad paste and was over-heating. It wouldn't do it on less demanding games
Yeah. In that regard, they did everything right, unlike Intel with their CPUs. They continued to improve their GPUs, rather than stagnating until something like Ryzen could happen. Their prices are definitely absolutely bonkers and they can't crash soon enough, but if they fall down, it's likely not because they release a maybe 2% increase over previous gen
Does it though? It's obviously not the point, but the video doesn't go into details and it neglects to mention timelines. Nvidia would often release their generation several months after Ati/AMD, which is a lot of time considering that back then GPU generations were on yearly release cycles. It's not really all that surprising that they often managed to come up with something ever so slightly faster than their competition when they had a bunch of extra time to get the clock speeds exactly right. The 9000 series absolutely wiped the floor with anything Nvidia could offer for years to come. So much so that 9800 and x800 used a slightly updated architecture with more execution units, yet they were still competitive with Nvidia's offerings. X1000, HD2000 were not great, so Nvidia's 7000 and especially 8000 series did dominate the market. Then Nvidia went on and re-release that generation twice over, so they lost the enormous lead they had. HD3000 was OK then and HD 4000/5000 were in many ways better than GTX 400/500, which were loud and used way more power. HD 7000 and GTX 600 were closely matched, but this is where it starts to fall apart for AMD. They did an Nvidia and re-released that generation twice with only minor changes, so they had little to offer against Nvidia's 700, 900, 10, and 20 series. RX 6000 was then very competitive against the 30 series again. Out of the 15 or so generations they covered here, Ati/AMD was competitive or had straight up better offerings for 7 of them. It's just that they've had a bit of "dry spell" from 2013 to 2019 and that's what most people remember.
Same, my GeForce 2 MX 400 64GB from Inno3D was an amazing value for OpenGL games like Unreal Tournament (with the S3TC texture pack!). The GeForce 2 GTS never made sense, and EVERYONE I knew was rocking MX 200 and MX 400 cards.
Great list. In 2014, I had two GTX 760s in SLI and loved them. In 2017 I upgraded to a 1070 and loved the cost/performance. In 2021 I got a 2070 super for $200 and still biding my time until prices aren't ridiculous. With a Samsung Odyssey G7 @ 1440p and 240hz refresh rate, I basically need a 4080 just to get even close to that FPS.
I was really happy with the 9600GT and GTX 460. The 9600GT (cheaper than but almost as fast as a 8800 GT) lasted me till I needed the GTX 460, and the GTX 460 lasted me till the 1050 Ti came out. Now I have a 3060 Ti and considering TSMC's prices I think it's going to last quite a while.
@@deadtake2664 TSMC: prints money, but also needs tens of billions of free dollars from governments that will never be repaid. Consumers not taxpayers should be the ones funding their breakneck roadmap. I'm sick of hearing free market economics advocates rail on about how great it is as they simultaneously hand out free money to for-profit companies.
@@Mr.Morden you’re really underselling what TSMC do, even with all of Nvidias engineering we’d be a generation behind if they were all using Samsung, its 100% Nvidias fault for hiking the prices by 70%, remember that despite the wafer costing more the 4080 and 4070 Ti have much smaller dies that more than offset the 25% wafer cost increase
@@deadtake2664 No, I'm saying taxpayers shouldn't be paying for TSMC's process advantages, TSMC should. I don't care if we would be a generation behind, that's not important. The chip fab industry operated for ages without these massive free money exchanges. The point is for the free market to be a free market. That also means divesting ourselves of non-free labor in non-free markets like China which devalue labor and labor's rights on the whole.
I used GT710 for 5 years. I got in middle school, when I was in a pretty tight budget. I absolutely hated that thing but my computer didn't have integrated graphics at the time so it was a life saver for me lol. I now have HD7950 I got from my dad's friend. It may not be the most powerful card as today but the jump from 710 is unbelievabely huge lol
The 1080ti is the best card for the money, ever. I sold my 1080ti FTW3 2 days before Christmas for $300 CAD.. 5 years later I recovered 1/3 MSRP. I actually regret selling it.. wish I kept it.
3:53 Another thing worth noting was the graphics APIs. ATI cards didn't support bump mapping or other graphical effects that the Nvidia cards did. Some games of the time had most of their textures bump mapped. Imagine playing Doom 3 without bump mapping. Escape from Butcher Bay was another heavily bump mapped title, but most people don't know what that is.
I'd love to see a teir list of general computer hardware. Not in terms of performance, but in terms of how much money reviewing and using said hardware made for LTT in terms of Video monetization.... I do understand that this type of data would be extremely difficult to quantify since LTT uses hardware for many different video's.
This is the best kind of content. just talk about generations of hardware over the years over and over. literally. i re watch all your old videos because I like to relive the memories. love comparing generations and specs! PhysX support started on 8000 series, not 400 series....
Awesome video! I hope you guys will make similar ones for AMD gpus, as well as integrated graphics from all companies (yes, nvidia motherboard chipsets included!), as well as CPUs! I love pieces like this were the info of all this time is put together in such a quick and interesting narrative, helps refresh the memory and fill in the gaps for many older generations of products ^ Even better when you go so far back that names like 3dfx Voodoo, Cyrix etc are mentioned ^
I was an early adopter of the 2080 TI. Everyone said I would regret it and I overspent. Well, I sort of did but the situation became more complex. See, that GPU proceeded to last me through the pandemic and the scalping crisis. I never had a chance to grab a 3XXX card until months ago. Those same people who said I’d regret it instantly regretted not taking the chance to upgrade. Did I overspend? Yeah. Did the card do its job well? Actually, yeah. It held up very well for 1440P gaming and only just started to show its age. Did this card save me from having to buy a scalped 3XXX card? Again, actually yeah. Sometimes purchases look awful in the moment but end up being more worthwhile over time. I just hope my new 7900 XTX can fill the same role.
I have a similar story, as I managed to build a new gaming rig right before the pandemic with a RTX 2070. Somewhere along the way I had upgraded from an i7 8700K to to i9 9900K, so I wanted to upgrade my video card too... and then the pandemic struck, so I've been stuck with the 2070 ever since. And I actually have very few complaints despite all the hate it got. The EVGA RTX 2070 Black had a solid price (I snagged it for under $500 on Newegg) and it's only gotten more competent over time as drivers matured and DLSS/Ray-tracing became more mainstream. For a first-gen attempt, it handles ray-tracing shockingly well now (as long as DLSS is on, which is great for fps but a mixed bag for fidelity). So while the RTX 20 series might not have shined during its time in the spotlight, it's managed grow into a solid workhorse for 1440p and ray-tracing to this day.
I still maintain that with the die shrink and everything the 8800 GT was almost a pre-rebrand of the 9800 GT. It was absolutely crazy and deserves its own mention as an absolute price/perf legend.
Wow you brought me back Linus! I remember sitting on the school bus in high school reading the computer paper and always turning straight to the NCIX section and drooling over info. I first met you in 2003! Wow has time flown by…
Really happy with the 3080 I got as MSRP when it launched. A good card to wait if maybe 50xx will be a return to form. 20xx and 40xx are similar in being not a bad product, but just a bad price.
20, 30 and 40 are basically all the same in that regard - if you could get a good price, then you're not going to be unhappy with the product. With 30 is was whether or not you could get MSRP, and with 20 series, it was when the 30 series was 1st announced and 20 series became cheap in anticipation of the 30. For 40 series... well there's just no good pricing yet really
While it makes sense that you started with the FX series, I can't help but wish you started a bit earlier. I still remember going to my local PC shop to buy my first GPU upgrade and having to convince the vendor that "yes, I want the GeForce 4 TI 4200. Not the 4MX and definitely not the 2MX. I want that 4 TI." 😅 So it would've been nice to hear LTT's opinion on that series of cards.
I wanted to see my old Riva TNT (or was it TNT2?) on that list! =) I think I went from Voodoo -> Riva TNT (maybe TNT2) -> GeForce 2 Pro, then switched to ATI/AMD until I replaced a failed 7970 with a GTX 770, then 1080 -> 1080 Ti (working in gaming I had a great chance to upgrade in fast succession there) -> 3080 now (launch pricing, so great deal).
Yeah, I thought the same thing. GeForce 3 was a pretty big deal too along with the launch of Doom 3; touting its' programmable shaders. It's difficult to set a starting point for a video of course, but not starting with the GeForce 256 seems strange, since this entire video is filled with that name. Though I feel TNT2 is what really put nVidia on the map to start with, I can understand wanting to keep the naming homogenous. But FX? That would never have been my choice.
@@tomzplI mean… kinda. These days, if you want a good graphics card. They don’t give it to you just like that. Before, it used to be, pay and get great performance. Now, it’s pay for great performance but we take something useful out of it.
@@tomzpl It depends on the settings you put it on. The higher the settings, the resolution, the amount of mods you use, and if you use Ray Tracing the more it affects the VRAM. I know people are shitting on 10 & 8 GB VRAM right now, but it's really not that big of a deal for the vast majority of games. The great thing about PC games is that you can always lower the settings if you want to play the game.
Moving from a 970 to this 1080Ti gave me the same winning feeling as going from a Matrox (Mystique?) to a 3DFX Voodoo card years before. Like my old Sandy Bridge 2500K, the 1080Ti has been one of my best upgrade choices.
I'd love to see an expansion of this video idea, which covers the competition between AMD/ATi and Nvidia over the generation. Mentioning which brand had the best flagship, mid-range, and budget of their era. And any notable technology / feature differences.
I built the wifes PC in 2014 got her 2 980's in Sli, that lasted a good few years, in fact she now has 2 Maxwell Titan X in Sli, that I took from my workstation, I now have a 24 core Threadripper, and 3090 I got for £1450 at release (Im a film maker) but the point is, neither of us need to upgrade for a long while, as both our PC's do everything we need them to do.
I held on to my 1060 (it's actully ok at medium to high settings at 1080p for most modern games).. I just upgraded to 3070ti.. but now I wish I have waited a bit more for the more RTX efficient and more mature 4070 or 4080... I really wished those Crypto Miner Scalpers have all Cancer now and I am happy for the ones who lost their money because of scalping the RTX30 series... They ruined it. But it's all done now I guess.
I’m still rocking my 980M on my ASUS ROG G751JY Laptop circa ~2015 and I’m still able to play the latest games without too many problems. Granted I’m not playing on 4K but rather 1080p but still most of the time the settings are set to high/ultra/custom and really no issues. Except the battery on my laptop died years ago so now it’s basically just a stationary battlestation laptop… honestly still torn about how I’ll even upgrade, probably looking to get another similarly quality laptop but with probably a GTX 3080 minimum which has me wondering which laptops even have a card like that and a 17” screen. XD but I reckon I still got time to do my research lol
I still run mine (not TI), insane value for the money ( 320€ at launch), which was a bit pricier than the rx480, but in my experience the 480 was absolutely horrible to use. I got a card that had a TON of artifacts, swapped to another 480, kept with same driver issues and swapped it to the 1070 till now. Still not even close to the value i got for my asus 660, which was running star wars battlefront (the lootbox one) at 100+ fps. A monster of a card
I went from a 260, to a 660ti, to a 970, then finally a 1080..... legit loved my 1080, such an amazing card. Was actually able to run 4k 60fps in games like battlefield 1. That was the moment I truly realized how amazing games could look
So much nostalgia here, I remember reading reviews off a PC mag about 8800GTX and 2900XT, that was pretty key in inspiring me to work in computer engineering
Honestly, I wasn’t going to watch this video. I thought that a GPU tier list would be pretty silly when faster is obviously better. I appreciate the more nuanced take on the ranking system. I’m also impressed with the amount of history packed into this 20 minute video. If this is the kind of quality we can expect from an LTT tier list video, I’m on board. Keep up the good work, LTT team!
The supply issues with the 30 series led me to buy from a system integrator for the first time since the mid 2000s. I was able to get a 5600x and a 3070 for barely more than what the scalpers were selling 3070s for by themselves.
Trying your hand at a laptop was also an option. Of course, expecting a 15-25% performance hit and loud fans are a given but hey you can still get the features and a good portion of the performance for relatively cheap
I bought into RTX with a 2060 founders edition. Honestly I was so blown away by even the 40fps I would get in ray tracing titles and all the tech demos at the time, that I really didn't mind the ridiculous performance hit. But DLSS has really saved that card. I'm still using it, and I can easily play games at 1440p max/high settings with DLSS enabled. Great technology. I've wanted to upgrade for a while, it just hasn't seemed worth dropping nearly 1000 bucks on a new GPU.
Man, same story with my 2070. I got a 4K OLED, and DLSS makes it all possible even with some Cyberpunk in RTX. That was the all point of the Turing architecture, and when you see the prices now.. it was THE gen to get
For me the 4000 series will most likely be my first upgrade since I got my GTX 980. The 980 is an absolute monster of a card but sadly has really started to trail behind. To me the 4000 series definitely looks like a great replacement and will kinda future proof my system for years to come, like the 980 did.
@@KMichiyu yeah I was doing a pretty big system upgrade but I noticed that the PCB had bent like 1/2 an inch from front to back due to the weight from the cooler. I decided to retire it while it is still working.
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well, when did Maxwell architecture debuted? haha it wasn't with 900 series, wasn't it? such a fail...
I see that this is a new "strat" on youtube?
Noticed a small typo when you introduced the 500 series, date range and architecture is shared from Tesla but should say Fermi. And you mentioned the 900 series introduced Maxwell which isn't actually true as the 750/ti introduced it before the launch of the 900 series and at the time they were swooped up by miners for their increased performance per watt over previous gen.
Will there be something like this with ATI/AMD gpu's generetions?
I think the 16 series and the 20 series should be separated.
Hands down, the GTX 1080Ti. It was an insane leap at the time. I'm still using mine to this day.
1080ti gang
Close enough to mine but my 1070 overexceeded my expectations. Started out with a gt 1030. The jump was insane
the 1080ti can even compete in RT performance with the current console... it's crazy.
sadly most modern games don't support rt on the 10 series anymore, it would be cool simply as a fun curiosity to test the 1080ti with newer RT games
@@kitsumyr9752 That would've been like being partially blind and then being able to see clearly lol. That must have been an insane jump, indeed!
1080Ti for the win here. Hands down the best nvidia card ever! 11Gb still going strong. A card that lasts 5 years. The phenomenon.
GTX 1080Ti hands down the best card Nvidia has ever made that lasted well into the current generation and the price to performance ratio was good value.
Indeed , I bought a 1070 ti second hand ( after my 1060 fried ) about 5 years ago and she is still doing me really well , only reason I would want to upgrade is for RTX... or maybe 4k gaming but eh not now , first need that 4k screen
In theory, a 3080Ti around 700 dollars or 800 that a friend bought a long time ago is just as good or better value thanks to well made DLSS and CUDA cores.
I built my new PC last month for myself with an RTX 3090, and build a good enough PC for my brother who games in 1080p. The 1080ti FE was handed down to him (along with an i7 4930k), and it continues to casually play everything amazingly well. best value for a card ever, 6 years old and it'll still be good enough for a few more years
im looking to upgrade and the only reason im not getting a 1080ti is because people are way overpricing it even on 2nd hand market. Its listed the same price and sometimes even more expensive than a used 3060ti
@@ponkotuu yeah, i went with a 3070 for the same reason. $320 canadian average on fb marketplace while you can get a 3060 (sometimes a ti if it's a good deal) for less, which has rtx and all the bells and whistles. just ended up coughing up the extra $50 for a 3070 since i might as well at that price difference. ridiculous second hand.
8800 GTX and the 1080Ti were both era defining cards that had an amazing and long lasting impact. And the performance came out of nowhere and moved the game on big time. My first Nvidia GPU was a brand new TNT2 ultra. I miss those days. I enjoyed this, a new GPU launch has always been exciting. I still remember when the GeForce 256 came out, that was impressive. I am hoping for an ATI/AMD equivalent video ;)
HD 7950 was pretty awesome for price to performance watt. That was an S tier card from AMD. Intel A750 with time will be an S tier for what it is to.
@@phoenixrising4995 Hd 7000 series was brilliant. My first ATI card was a 9700 Pro which was equally awesome. I’ve still got a few HD cards, a pair of 6970’s, a 5970, 5870 etc etc…that was such a great time!
lol I went from a TNT2 card to the RTX 2080 Super - I was into counterstrike in early 99-03 and then didn't bother with PC gaming again till 2018 when I got a huge bonus at work... lol so I went from a Pentium 3 866mhz with a TNT2 Ultra card (parents dell computer) then 15ish years later I deceided to get back into PC gaming and bought a 9900k and a 2080 Super
@@TrainWreck444 wow, that’s what I call an upgrade 😅 like going from horse and cart to a Saturn V
I still have a TNT2 and HD7950 but my 8000 series was mobile SLI, I'll have to ask my friend about his old 1080ti if he ever gets rid of it so I can have the whole collection in this comment thread lol
"Future price drops" Yeah that didn't happen. 4090 up to $2000
@@aernancoc they’ve now gone to half of that price, surprisingly
@@GamerStyle113 I just tried looking for some 24 gig models and they're all around $2k on my end😭
@@JAYTBAYB In Sweden they're $2300 😭😭
@@CoIinFX jesus 😵💫
In the UK the cheapest one I can find is around £1,300 ($1,730) and it is a REFURBISHED card!
Man the 1080TI was really something else for its time. Even today that card can play anything and refuses to die. I'd comfortably say it's easily one of the greatest cards of all time.
I have the baby 1080 and I have never been happier
I still play with a 7year old nvidia strix 1070 8gig. A lot of games on high settings, even with msfs 2020. It is a realy good card tbh.
1080 was ahead of its time, and still has practical use while outperforming a good proportion of the RTX 20, 30, 40, and 50 series cards and being less expensive than today's flagship. The GTX 1050 or 60 mobile performed identically go the desktop counterparts. Gamers weren't fps shamed for not being an American with big desk and big electricity. The GTX 10 series was truly G.O.A.Ted
It was so good you could comfortably ignore the next three generations.
@@SNTrepie Its best card ever done.
The 10 series was my favorite era. I still remember walking into my local Best Buy back when I didn't know much about computers and walked out with a new $250 EVGA GTX 1060. Little did I know I had bought the greatest card I'd ever own. Also, I just miss when they would make Titan cards.
If only you'd gotten a 1080ti you'd have an even longer reigning best card ever. They pretty much still make titans though with the 90 tier cards with double the ram or the highest end of the professional lineup with twice as much as that for like 3+ times the price.
@@ffwast Why does it matter now? Assuming the 1060 worked for them at the time, why would they have needed a more powerful card, that is now only as good as a 3060Ti?
1060 was good. I was very happy with my 1070 as well but nothing beat the 8800 GT. At 199 dollars you got top tier performance. And it was good enough for years to come. People who are too young to remember don’t really realise how good it was. Edit: seems 199 was not the launch price but it dropped to that a few months later. In any case at that price it was a heck of a deal. Edit again: techpowered up 349 price seems wrong. Anandtech review at the time says 199.
I knew nearly nothing when I grabbed my 1060 6Gb. That thing lasted me for years before I sold the PC to a friend. They still use it. Awesome value for 1080p gaming.
Im still on that era, the 1070 I got at launch is still working, maybe I will get a 4070 this year.
10 series was definitely S tier with the 1080ti being an absolute beast. The 3000 series is a little tougher as the price at msrp was great and performance was good but as we’re starting to see now, the limited vram in 3060ti-3080 is started to pose a threat to the longevity of the cards playing some newer titles at 1440p and higher resolutions.
Games can't increase their VRAM requirements because console VRAM isn't increasing until a new generation comes out
Those card will be alright for a while
the fact the 1060 is gonna be 7 years old this year and its still listed a minimum requirement gpu is pretty insane. such a valued card for 1080p for the people who bought it new.
@@joebob2699 consoles have 16gb gddr6 which while being shared with system still could easily allow for 12-14 allocated to gpu when needed. This gives current gen consoles some headroom over the 3070’s 8gb and 3080’s 10gb which have both suffered from vram related issues in Hogwarts Legacy and Dead Space Remake
My 1070ti still kicks ass
Totally agreed on all the rankings. I still have the 1080Ti but I've owned most of the flagships in this video. The 8000 series was such a fun time to be a gamer, as was the 10 series. Hope we get another S tier sometime in my life.
Not with the prices they're going for now, the sheer physical sizes and of course the insane power usage.
@@Koozwad the technology is stagnating. we need a new gpu design to keep pushing transistor count without the need to increase the physical size and tdp
I have the 1070
Cool. It's a shame that Alan Wake 2 can't run on Pascal. This is the first AAA title that I can't run at high settings with my 1080Ti. It's not even because the 1080Ti isn't powerful enough either, because it's more than enough. It's because Pascal doesn't support mesh shaders, which is required for this game.
@@soulsniper7398
@@plasmahvhSo true, am on a 2080ti, at this point SLI makes more sense than a budget upgrade, like...whaaat the fuck 😂
It's so crazy for me as a 23 year old seeing how they went from a card like the FX 5000 in 2003 when I wasn't even in preschool yet to something like the 4090 now when I'm coming out of college. The amount of progress they made in 20 years is insane. They managed to do that much in just a part of my lifetime. Of course there was some short comings on that journey and the pricing recently is really high but it's still very impressive and I can only wonder what new features or developments will come in the next 20 years
I know it's crazy 😂
Honestly, I have to say I find that the rate of progress in computers and gaming much slower now than 20+ years ago. Sure the number are impressive but in the 90s it felt like there was a total revolution every year.
Probably not much considering nvidia themselves said they want to go the apple route of seeming premium and revolutionary and jacking up prices every time they can, but doing the minimum of effort under the hood. Current RTX40 gen is a clear exemple of that and RTX50 is already known to be an iteration of the same concept, they don't plan on transforming their current architecture to be more cost effective anytime soon.
The good news is if people don't keep chasing ever bigger resolutions that really don't matter anymore, mid range cards will deliver all the perf you need to get as many frames as your screen can output. Top 3d games today already look borderline photorealistic if they want to so we're in a good place I'd say.
The pricing was the where the progress went most
As a 25 yo, I witnessed the history from 9600gt to rtx40 series.(or maybe 7000 series but I didn't knew much back then and only start to really understand after I got my first 9600gt)
I think overall the best was the 1080TI, used it for 5+ years.
overall the 8000 gtx is by far Nvidia's finest
Yea passed down my 1080Ti to my lil bro a few months back, fuckin awesome card. On a 6900XT now
1080Ti is the value mistake Nvidia will never make again.
GTX10 was fire. 1080 for $499, 1080Ti for $699 (NV got scared of Vega which was meh), GTX 1060 for $249 and the amazing value 1050Ti with 4GBs for $149.
@@danielmdax 1060 6GB might have been the best price/longevity deal I ever made. I used that card until the end of '22. I only upgraded cause I managed to get a 3060 for sub-$350 prices.
@@IrisCorven This is really it. Sure as a enthusiast card 1080ti was great value. However the 1060 6gb was really the one that sold and it was also great value. There is a reason why it was the most popular card on Steam until late 2022.
Can we get more videos like this please? It's basically a straight up information download and it's awesome. The list of questions and things I have to research after watching this is huge, I love it.
seriously! so much great info in here that helps buyers make sense of a very confusing lineage of products that are so susceptible to marketing gimmicks.
He did worst to beat right after saying best to worst tho
Nah b
Linus walked us through 20 years in 30 mins. I love it 😁
The GTX 970 was, at one time, the most used card on Steam. Many people getting into PC gaming for the first time and basically everyone from casual Pc gamers to value yet hardcore PC gamers had one. Many people would say it should be S tier just for that. And if I remember correctly it was a pretty big sample size.
Still rocking my GTX 970 and still miffed it only has 3.5GB VRAM. Got the card specifically because I wanted 4 GB 🤡 I have a 4060 Ti coming in that I'm pretty hyped about despite all the negativity surrounding it. The card performs almost on-par with the RTX 3070 and it's a huge step up for me 🤷♂
@@OniCr0wawesome! I also have a 970 and am looking at the 40 series pretty nicely right now. Im curious what made you decide that card? there are so many options its overwhelming
@OniCr0w Me too, gtx 970 is really the go-to budget card if an rx 580 is out of the question.
I upgraded to 3060 ti since I really didn't think the 4000 series was gonna that much of an upgrade and ended up being half right (4060 ti either performs the same or slightly better than 3060 ti in certain games).
Hope you got the 16gb 4060 ti, or not, $500 for that is crazy to be honest
Still uses the thing...and now in serious need of upgrade. Sucks that the current gen cards are so shit price-wise. Honestly tho, the fact that 7900XTX and the 4080 price are neck and neck in my country means it's going to be hard to decide which to get (and the fact that 4090 is like at least 50% more expensive suuuucks).
I beat from start to finish cyberpunk 2077 on a 970 card. What a trooper of a card. I refuse to throw it away.
Really looking forward to the AMD / ATI tier list that's hopefully soon to follow!
Same. That's what I wanna see now.
🥰
Can't wait for that one tbh. It's gonna be a sadder saga in places but imo quite a triumph towards the end. Ppl often forget what an awful state AMD were in for a few years back. First Intel, then that secured and ensured, Nvidia... And all but for the extreme edge of the as yet still niche ray tracing, they did. RDNA2 was first time trading blows to the top in years plus they got the past driver inconsistency sorted, caught up re upscalers and etc. I had to laugh when Linus flashed up the current comparison benchmarks where of the top 6 cards AMD are 4 of them, at 4K no less, only the 4080 and 4090 in there and not both in top place either.
My 6800XT was a no brainer over the 3080 (and it's anaemic 10Gb) two years ago when the latter cost, seriously 50-100% more, with no availability for months vs 3 days for the 6800XT and how that difference got me the same perf plus allowing me to afford better parts for the rest of the build. Prices rn still greatly favour AMD in the UK even taking their lesser (though still improved over last gen) RT perf into account: 4070ti's £800-960, 7900XT's £890-1050, 7900XTX's £1000-1200, 4080's £1200-1700, 4090's £1700-2490. The first three are pretty fairly scaled imo price/perf fwiw but after that, wtf. The 7900XTX beats the 4080 and has been seen closing in on the 4090 already for a hefty chunk less than the 4080 where premium cards are concerned. I'm not paying that much more for 'better' RT that I'll barely use, if at all (few games I own rn, only as many again foreseen in the next year or two) and still needs DLSS assured to bring back fps from sub 60. The 4090ti I'm sure will be even more an assured perf win for Nvidia over what the 4090 is but at what price... 3 grand like the 3090 was 2 years ago when the 6900XT that matched it never got over £1700 here at worst? Meanwhile, if there is a 7950XTX or like in the wings it'll put even more pressure on the 4090 and still be enough difference to upgrade something else (CPU/mobo/RAM etc) meaningfully. Nvidia are tripping tbh, sure the 4090 is crazy good but that price... crazy bad no matter how good.
Sorry if this got ranty but AMD really by this point deserve way better recognition and even praise than the old 'hur dur bad drivers, hot and loud, but muh ray tracing, DLSS is better and some encoder bs' that is still much the norm in many forums. I can't think offhand of any company that turned things around so damn well as AMD actually has.
imho
Radeon 9000: S
Radeon X: C or B
Radeon X1000: B
Radeon HD 2000: F
Radeon HD 3000: D
Radeon HD 4000: A
Radeon HD 5000: S
Radeon HD 6000: C
Radeon HD 7000: S
Radeon R 200: B
Radeon R 300: C
Radeon RX400: A
Radeon RX500: B
Radeon RX 5000: B
Radeon RX 6000: A
Radeon RX 7000: ?
Same, but I hope he gets the Tiers / Scaling correctly. I agree with his assessment but not the scores in this video. Here's my take:
S = Ge6000, Ge8000, GTX 200, GTX 10, RTX 30-MSRP
A = Ge7800, GTX 400, GTX 600, GTX 900
B = Ge7900, GTX 500, GTX 700, RTX 40
C = GeFX, Ge9000, GTX 16
D = GeFX, GTX 800, RTX 20, RTX 30-Scalp
F = Ge300, GTX 1, GTX 300
If you see a pattern there you're not mistaken. Always get S-Tier, occasionally get A-tier, and try to avoid B-tier and lower. As a consumer, an upgrade path was advantageous for your from the (2004) Ge6800 to Ge7800 GTX-512 (2005), Ge8800 GTX (2006), GTX 280 (2008), GTX 470 (2010), GTX 680-4GB (2012), GTX 980Ti (2015), GTX 1080Ti (2017), RTX 3080-MSRP (2020). That's 9 card purchases over 16-Year span, not too shabby but definitely not as longevity as a Home Console which sees minimum 5-Year relevancy.
I'm amazed by how quickly my mood can still turn at the mention of how hard we all got bent over by scalpers and cryptodouches with the 30 series, and how Nvidia seems to think that keeping those jacked up prices is acceptable for the 40 series now that the extraordinary one-off surge in demand is over. It's absolutely rage-inducing.
Absolutely insane I remember when i was shopping for a gpu before the crypto craze i think it was a 2070 or 1080 and it was only like 1600 nzd which is like 900 usd. Recently found my friend bought a rog strix 3080ti from the same place for 3300 nzd which is like 2400 usd. Fucking wild
He bought it jan of last year but still over 2k usd for a 3080 card is crazy
Were not dead yet. Will not buy em
@@bannabanana6950I’ve seen 3080’s new for around 900. Haven’t looked at prices in a month though
I have a feeling the 50 series will come back down a bit, it’s going to be like how the car market got crazy and is coming back down, once everyone who can afford those crazy prices has their card companies are going to have to start appealing to the average consumer again.
I bought a 17" Toshiba laptop in 2006 with a 7900GTX in it and I had almost immediate regret when the 8000 series came out around 6 months later, the performance gap blew my card away. Love the way you properly captured generation to generation excitement and expectations.
Also glad you mentioned the end of AGP support. Last year I built a retro Pentium 4 PC and needed to figure out what the best maxed out AGP card was. Got lucky and found an EVGA 256-A8-N509-AX compatible with my board.
Crazy how he didn’t mention more on how the 1080 Ti absolutely cemented the entire series into S tier.
After all these years , that card is still relevent and can play all the latest games , no problem . That's really impressive.
Because all the cards where amazing I think. I used a 1060 untill 4 weeks ago. And it was 250$ GPU 2016. That kind of long terme support and usability was unheard before. The 1060 was the most used GPU well up into 2022 for a reason. That kind of bang for the bug didn't exist before and will probably never exist ever again.
Everything was good on the 1000 series, not just the 1080ti. The 1070, the 1060, they were all high quality cards in their price points. Hell even the 1050
It's weird because I know it had insane performance at the time, yet my 2060 is almost faster and it was way cheaper too
@@adxo lol no. 1080 ti is just as fast a 2080.
GTX1070 hands down was and still the greatest purchase I’ve made till this day. I’m still rocking this gpu and after 6-7 years & still holds its performance strong. It’s a pity I’d need to upgrade soon to 3070 due to work requirement.
Same here, ive got a 1070ti from the very start and still going to strong!
@@exzer5507 Me too.
Me too! Just upgraded from 1070 to 4070 Ti last week. The only reason I upgraded is because I bought a new LG 4K C2 OLED gaming TV and the 1070 simply cant handle 60 fps gaming on 4k. Other than that the 1070 manages to play games at 1080p just fine for the last 6 years at 60 fps. I love that card! Best $350 spent on a card!
@@InOLuvShiKa did you also have to upgrade your cpu or still using the old one? If you don’t mind sharing
@@Mojohoojo187 I actually upgraded my CPU back in 2020 from i7 2700k to i7 10700. Sure there might be some bottlenecks in 1080p resolution but I now mostly play games on 4K resolution and the bottleneck on this resolution is less than 10% so I'm totally ok with it and didn't feel the need of upgrading the CPU again this time. This thing still rocks 👍
My EVGA 1070 must be one of the best cards I ever owned. It ran games back then great and lasted me all the way through covid and the shortage spectacularly. I've since upgraded to EVGA's 3080 but I remember the 1070 fondly.
My MSI GTX 1070 is the best GPU that I have ever owned, bought it back in 2016 and it ran amazing till 2021 till I sold it and bought a RTX 3070, now I have upgraded to a 3080Ti but do I miss my 1070 more than my 3070.
I feel ya’ll. 2019 started with rx 580 4gb it sucked went right to 1070 within 3 weeks got it refurbished from Zotac for 175$ then a 2070s a year later and it felt like no upgrade. Then a 3070 7 months later and I finally felt an upgrade but the 1070 was more than capable at 1440p even on games like Metro Exodus without rtx on. Actually the 1070 did higher frames with rtx off than the 2070s did with rtx on. So it felt like a downgrade. Because rtx off on 2070s was only like 10% more frames tbh on that game.
The 1070 for 175$ in 2019 would be like getting a 3070 for 175$ today. Crazy good deal
my 1070 lasted me for a good 7 years before i replaced it with a 6700xt. absolutely nothing wrong with it. powerhouse through and through
so cool to see the love for the 1070. my "old" rig, which is mostly stuff from 2010, i threw a 1070 in, and it runs 2020 era games great! massive performance, just a stellar card.
Still using my MSI 1070. However, I'm planning to build a new pc very soon, so I'll enjoy it until its time to retire it.
Oh man, memory lane. I had a 7900GS and then moved up to an 8800GT and it was so epic. I had that 8800GT for years and years until I moved up to an R9 290 lol. Glad to know that 8000 series was the best generational leap ever, I knew there was a reason I upgraded after just one gen.
I'd love to see an AMD card (ATI included) tier list one day. This one was great
What about an intel GPU tier list
@@zaphod4245 That... would be a very short list, since ARC came out literally last year
Indeed. Remember the 9800 Pro?
Me too....😍❤
@@TheByQQ intel havd try get in market before arc too. But they fail...😣
This video made me appreciate how the EVGA design team evolved over the years. It's a gorgeous card after another, I will miss them cards...
I don't get why people like the EVGA 3000 cards, they're so overdesigned and bulky I just don't see the appeal
@@cash_banooca17 EVGA cards came with EVGA customer service.
@@afivey Yea but that doesn't have to do with the designs
@@cash_banooca17 now u get it
@@cash_banooca17 exactly
This was very fun. Tier lists usually bore me, but the baked in history lesson made it very informative.
Same thought here!!
I have huge nostalgia with the 600 series. It was the first time I started building PCs for people and I used the 760/660/ti for a lot of my friends. And a few Radeon 7000 cards. Though the peak of GPUs, for many is the 1000 series. My 1070 still going strong bought brand new the month it released. Would love to upgrade if prices weren't insane.
I appreciate you splitting the RTX 30 series cards on the tier list. I managed to get one for MSRP a month after they came out. During that time I had a restock website open and constantly refreshing websites. Stayed up super late nights for the illusive late night/early morning restocks. I even joined an nvidia discord server to stay up to date on the hunt.
It was more exhausting than simply buying a product ever had to be. And honestly no matter how good the next generation of cards are, im never doing that again.
I was super fortunate that when I was looking to buy my first PC, I managed to find one on FB marketplace. As much as I would have liked to have built it myself, buying the individual parts pack in 2021 would have cost an absurd amount. But I managed to get my prebuilt for only $1450, with a 3070 and i7-10700F. Having been able to get the 3070 without ant particularly insane levels of stress, I actually love it as a card. It's a huge jump from the laptop 1070 that I was using for a long time, although tbf that 1070 really went above and beyond what I ever expected it to do. For a laptop GPU, it went crazy. Even though it would only be pushing maybe 30ish fps on large AAA games, that was still impressively smooth for how old the card was and how hot it would run. I eventually sold the laptop to my brother, because he was trying to game on a crappy laptop with integrated graphics that would die trying to run anything
i also joined one of those servers and then it turned out the server admin was a genuine groomer acting creepy towards minors so i left. managed to snag a 3080 at retail price though through pure luck, it served me well until a few months ago when i sold it to my brother steeply discounted as a christmas present.
Who ever wrote this did really well. It's difficult to edit a script into a consumeable time frame like this. If I were presenting this I would need to do a 3 hour gamers nexus super tangent focused oh the good ole days form factor.
Kudos on the condensed history lesson for builders and enthusiasts learning the craft alike.
Usually not a big fan of tierlists but I loved this video. It was very informative and kind of felt like I was speedrunning Nvidia history. Will you do something like this on AMD/ATI cards as well?
I went from Voodoo 2 to 6800 to 260 to 760 to 1080Ti to 3080 now, I am pretty happy with my choices so far :). Good list!
My path was very similar to yours. Voodoo2->7800 (single at first then SLI)->275->750->1060 (6GB). Most of these were second hand so I'm usually a few years behind the curve, hence I'm still on the 1060 but plotting my next move, so currently re-watching a load of videos like this one!
@@garethr1970 Nice! Good luck finding your next GPU!
The 6600gt, 8800gtx, 560ti, 970 and 1060 are probably the most well-known cards that were still listed years later as "recommended" specs or good second hand cards. They were all incredible.
The 6600GT was such a bargain! ❤️
1080s are so cheap the past 2 months that they stomp those 1060s for just 20% more and 85% more performance. i feel like they took that spot lately
970
I just bought a 1080TI because my 2070 broke and I needed a cheap replacement and it just blow my old 2070 out of the fucking water, in 2023 lol
I finnaly retired the 1060 6gb for a Noctua 3070 OC, but that card was amazing. Traded my dad a 970 and $50 for it too.
My first graphic card was XFX 8600gt. I was excited like hell. The box it came was in a X shaped and with a Green Lantern Dog on the cover. Ahh... those were the days. Currently using 1070 8 GB for over 4 years now...
Same. Using the 1070 8g on X-plane 12 and it runs it really well at 1440.
Good to see that you rated the 8800 GTX and the 10 series as S tier. Those cards were legends for their respective times.
8800 GTX - the original card that "could run Crysis" 😁
I had an 8600 GT that was passively cooled. It was a PoS. My 10 series is doing better. I dipped in the middle with a 6950, so I'd be keen to know if that was an S tier generation as well (from memory it was my longest lived card).
g80 the ATi slayer, a legendary GPU.
Glad you mentioned the 200 series favorably. A number of years ago, my dad got a sweet deal on an Alienware M15X in 2014 and it was the first gaming laptop I'd ever owned. (Mind you, I didn't buy laptops that often) Compared to every laptop and integrated graphics workstation I'd been on before that from the late 90s and early 2000s, it was absolutely mind-blowing to me at the time.
The 8800 GTX will always have a special place in my heart. I remember managing to convince my parents to choose it when we were buying the old family PC from Dell. It was such a beast, had it paired with the Q9300 processor, all my friends had the Q6600 though which I'm sure plenty of people remember the OC wars with that one.
Same! Had the 8800 GT (still have it in original box) with a Q6600 and remember very well when my room mate bought a Radeon 4870 X2 and Q8300 and I out-performed that beast of a card in Crysis 😄
Not for very long though, in true Radeon fashion the early drivers were utter garbage..
And in a way you did not mislead them. They got their money’s worth unlike with some of the recent top tier cards!
30 minute video!?!?! Yeah, it was great. I watched all of it. Great presentation covering all of the old gen stuff and how they ranked. 👍
Fun fact: The 9800 GTX+ came back rebadged as a GTS 250 - they were even compatible to run together in SLI. This was the setup I had for over a year back in the day... good times 😅
The GTS 240 was the 3rd rebadge I was curious if anyone else would mention it. Since how many cards got 3 lives. Kinda surprised it didn't earn an honorable mention in the video
I had both of those cards and planned to try SLIing them, but never got around to it, the 250 did have less memory though.
I ran those two in SLI as well! Or so I thought... I recall checking on my settings about a year after I bought the GTS 250 and found that SLI had been disabled at some point, and I was just running on one card in games. No idea how long that second card was just sitting there not doing anything.
I am almost 50 years old and I have been a gamer my entire life. My biggest wow effect was with the Diamaond Monster 3d 3dfx card and Wing Commander Prophecy. Never ever since that moment there was such a big leap in visual enhancement than that. The Diamond Monster was an add on, you needed a graphics card on top and it cost 380 $ but boy was it worth it for awhile.
I got a 3060 ti at msrp at launch and I can say I'm pretty happy. I definitely agree with the S tier choice. Only $400 usd for an insane card like the 3060 ti
I scored a 3060Ti for close to MSRP myself and the difference in 1440P coming from a GTX 1660 super was pretty good. I can see myself rocking it for many years.
i got a 3060ti a few months ago for 330$ used, couldn’t be happier
Same, got mine at MSRP shortly after launch. Upgraded from a GTX 970 since it was struggling to push new titles to 144, and the performance uplift was simply jawdropping to me. Max quality 1080p at 144 for most games is no problem, I've been loving it. Might jump to 1440p144 or might give 1080p240 a shake, not sure which yet.
@@YuriZakhaev i’m going 1080p240 rn, got an xg2431 for like 280$ on sale and this thing is insane, it’s ips and has some of the best motion clarity on a monitor out right now
@@YuriZakhaevI know, it's amazing. I went from APU to 1050 2gb to the 3060 ti and the difference was incredible to say the least. I run 165hz 1440p and most games it runs smooth
In hindsight, very glad I bought a 3070 at launch. It was bit of an impulse buy, and I had to deal with some early driver issues (even had a little buyers remorse), but omg, the value and longevity is definitely S tier and I dodged the mining scalping bs. This card will last me quite some time.
I just bought a Noctua 3070 1 month ago for $750, glad prices came down
Yeah, I'm glad I grabbed a 3080 at launch similarly. Or, well, I put in an order for one at launch and got it like 3-4 months later, but still it was MSRP, and cost less than what I'd paid for a 1080 Ti some years before! (Work with graphically intensive games so didn't buy these just for personal use, and also got tax deductions.
@@peterzwart2357 wtf 750? That seems insanely expensive for the performance, yikes
Same. I got a 3060 Ti at launch for $600 AUD - and I’m still rocking it today. Fantastic card considering what it could do, and how much I paid for it.
And it paid for itself too, mining in my downtime.
Bought a 2080, it stopped working with 3 months left on the warranty.
Got a refurb 3070 as a replacement. Best value i've ever had from a graphics card.
I cant wait for an amd version of this! these videos are basically history recaps and its great for new comers to the hobby to learn and see how things have evolved.
Though it's still only part of the history. The really early days (I guess before Linus -was old enough- got into this ;-)) are missing.
The 900 and 1000 series will always be insane coming off the back of the 780ti. Just being 14 back then, not long having built my first PC and always knowing the 780ti and titan series as the be all end all and then seeing the performance and cost AND power efficiency upgrade for all the cards was crazy to me back then. And then the 1000 series blew my mind all over again.
Also can we talk about those early 2000s(the decade) cards doubling performance and halving the price? Some of that nowaday?? Maybe not paying over $500 for a decent 1440p card nvidia?
I think the 2000 series got its fair bump when the Super variants were finally introduced, as they did not uplift in msrp, but they sure did improve a lot on the lacking performance leap vs 1000 cards. I'm still happy with my 2070S running all my modern AAA games on my 3K monitor, and while I do truly wanna upgrade to the 4000 series, I am not in any rush to do so. If I had the regular non-Super variant, I might have bit the bullet on one of the more recent gpus.
For reference I have a 2070 non super and theres no way im upgrading to 40 series with these prices. I can still run any game at like 80 fps at 2k on a mix of medium to high settings
2070 S was one of my best cards. Well balanced for 1440p.
Same Still Rocking my 2070Super and think I can wait for 5000 Series before needing an Upgrade.
20 series aged well. Dlss sucked at launch but now dlss 2.0 is awesome.
I got my 2070 to replace a 1070 and was called stupid at the time. Well all the 20's series adopters turned out to be wise investors when pandemic pricing hit and my "overpriced" card was suddenly cheap in comparison. Also you hit the nail on the head with DLSS and I happily played Cyberpunk when my friends were complaining about the performance of their 1080's LOL
Used 1060 6gb, 980ti, and now using the 3070.
3070 really surprised me that the frames went doubled compared to the 980ti.
All three cards are great in value until now and I will keep my 980ti which I have used for over 4 years.
But yeah.. it’s a pity that I haven’t used the 1080ti.
Still rocking a 980 ti. Woot woot! Ride til it dies!
@@patricksparksadventures 980ti still rocks even on AAA games on 1080p@60fps!
Incredible gpu till today!
still happy with my msi 1060 6gb. It was probably the best value back in 2016 for what I had in my pockets
@@llamateur very true. I mostly play Fortnite with some friends and it hits between 120-144 on my 1440p monitor. Obviously this is an optimized game and I’m not running ultra settings but it’s hard to justify upgrading while it’s still running no questions asked.
I also have my 980ti on the shelf, I left it for a 3080 last year but let my buddy use it while he was waiting on a card. It is still very capable at 1080p and even 1440p!
The biggest jump in performance I ever got was upgrading from a Riva128 to a TNT2. I have never been impressed that much by a graphics card again, I think. That card could run Heretic2 in 1024x576 easily! 😄
Mine has honestly been the 2070 super coming from the 1060. Understandably when the 20 series came out, the value proposition wasn't good at all, but I picked up the 2070 Super for 450 right before the 30 series launched, and features such as DLSS have kept me able to play brand new AAA titles at high resolutions without any trouble. I have no regrets.
Riva tnt was great. Out performing my friends voodoo systems dramatically was a nice change.
Man the TNT2 was such a monster. I remember playing NICE 2 and Q3 in 1280 x 960 with no issue!!
@@c0mmanderKeen RagePro > TNT2 tho
@@clamhands42069 this
going from a rx 580 4gb and hearing my computer turn into a jet engine running things like gta, to finally upgrade to a 2060 super. Its SO quiet.
I waited 10 hours in line at a best buy when I found out they were restocking(back during the shortage). I wanted a 3070 ti but by the time I got to the front the only ones they had left were 3090. Sleep deprivation got the best of me. Ended up getting it and still don’t regret it
Personally, I have very fond memories of my GeForce 6600 GT. It was one of two cards (the former was the GeForce4 MX 440) that took me through the games of my childhood, and by my count was the card that stayed with me the longest. The card itself is now in the box, on the shelf of functional components, having its own special place on it, as well as in my memory, and the only thing wrong with it is the fan that has gone to the land of eternal low revolutions and well-greased bearings.
For all the flak the RTX 20 series got at launch, I think it managed to turn things around dramatically as drivers matured and more games began supporting DLSS and optimized ray-tracing. I remember never even wanting to bother with ray-tracing when I first got my EVGA RTX 2070 Black, as it basically just ensured a cinematic experience. But roughly four years later, I'm coming back to games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Control, and keeping well above 60fps at 1440p with DLSS, ray-tracing, and most settings at or near max. I mean, without DLSS it's kinda of a poopshow, but don't say RTX never gave you nuthin.
Also, I got mine for well under $500 right before the pandemic, so definitely no complaints.
Yes, RTX 20 series really aged well and one generation had to start it all. Otherwise we wouldn't have DLSS and Raytracing nowadays.
In a vacuum the 10 and 30 series were far better, but considering the mess of a GPU market that followed, the 20 series turned out to be a decent buy.
@@jfolz I think you just about nailed it.
As someone who got into the PC gaming scene during the GTX 900 series launch, I appreciate seeing the history of Nvidia's and AMD's cards. Great video!
Would have liked to see 1660 Super mentioned with its enhancements to original. Very great video. Recently inspired to build my first PC after watching scrap wars. Thank you.
Agreed, I'm really pleased with mine and I believe it's one of the best value-for-money cards we've seen from NVIDIA.
@@maxek46 honestly dude. I built my whole rig for £200 which isn’t a huge amount but have a 1660Super and a good build for the price (2012 mother board and of course CPU with it) and all but it runs decent for me. And it’s only inspired from Linus and the crew doing these.
I fondly remember the 2004-2009 period in computing, where each generation saw these insane jumps in performance and value. I kept up to date by reading the printed PC magazines at my scholl's library haha.
I love that you put the 8800 series in S Tier. A friend of a friend was getting rid of a computer he didn't like and I didn't have one so I was lucky enough to be gifted it...for free because he didn't like the pc for some reason. This was the most fun I ever had on a PC and the 8800 GTX he had in there was beautiful. I miss when cool designs/pictures were put on video cards but to each their own.
Seeing Linus go over the nightmare of the 30 series launch really makes me glad I got lucky and grabbed my 3070 from the Verified Actual Gamers program LTT had a few years ago.
I think the 1060 6GB was the best card ever created because it was one of the very few times when a lower mid-range card could max out games released during that generation at 1080p (which was like crème de la crème) and 60 FPS and unfortunately that was the last time we ever saw that again
I'm still with my 1060 I bought for 200 bucks or so. I've would like to upgrade to a double performance, but I'm not paying double price.
@@dracalat2510 You’ll definitely be in for an upgrade within the next year or so. Insane little card but it’s starting to show its age
Im still annoyed that young me did not know that a 3gb version of the 1060 existed, which i of course ended up buying.
This is the best Tier Lists I've ever seen. I love that you have all the actual cards on hand for B-Roll
It was also really informative, which basically unheard of from tier lists
Yeah this was a good list, only thing I would change is to bump the RTX4000 down to D-tier
Yeah, this one has actual effort and research put into it, head and shoulders above every other tier list I've seen!
i feel like he did the 16 series dirty by lumping it with the 20 series and then not mentioning a single card
The old cards with their own drawings on them looked so damn pretty they should definitely bring that back.
Don’t some companies sell waifu edition cards?
@ZaHandle Devolved*
No mroe art in the world - everything is soulless and sterile now. Most artistic creativity and ancient knowledge was destroyed/hidden by the west starting in the first world war and continuing in the second world war. Look at buildings built in the last ~100 years. Soulless architecture.
@@OilFreeFeathersTTD?
Seeing the old cards and how they priced the generations to each other has to make you mostalgic, getting much more performance with a new generation with only a little extra cost and having mid tier cards that outperform the last generation for less money always felt like a real technological improvement instead of maximum greed like today
If inflation is so real, then why are only GPUs affected by it? SSDs, RAM and CPU prices are going down. And that too while providing huge performance improvements. Inflation has always been a thing but the improvement in technology, Moore's law and competitions have only brought prices down. Its all is just an ngreedia shills' excuse to support overprice.
cost of R&D and salaries to workers doesn't even make a dent in all multibillion dollar corporations' billions of dollars of profits.
a 4090 die costs 300 bucks MAX to make according to wafer calcs and TSMC prices per wafer. and that 300 bucks number from calcs is too high because on the same wafer where big dies don't fit you can make smaller dies like a 4080, a 4070Ti etc. which ngreedia gets "for free" - if you account for them unlike wafer calcs do = they lower the cost of a wafer significantly.
$1600-$2000 for a less than 300 bucks 4090 die? just lol. I understand if they'd want 800 bucks for that, max. it still would be at least 200 bucks overpriced.
a 4080 die costs 150 bucks MAX - again without accounting for smaller dies that are made "for free" on the same wafer. $1200+ for that?
and ngreedia is trying to sell 60-class cut down silicon as 4070ti for 800 bucks with 12gb VRAM, they even tried to sell it like 80-class silicon for 900 bucks at first. 12gb VRAM on 800-900+ bucks cards, Carl! 12gb VRAM... in 2023... on 800-900+ bucks GPUs!!!111
12gb VRAM is fine for 3060 performance level, a 4070tie should have at least 16GB or 24Gb as a 3090. otherwise its a morally obsolete GPU, especially for 800-900+ bucks.
the 4070ti is basically a morally obsolete piece of crap suitable only for either extreme budget 1080p monitors, or for old games @1440p.
and ngreedia wants 800-900+ bucks for that ridiculous piece of crap GPU with 12GB VRAM.
the real problem is ngreedia don't really care about selling GPUs at all anymore. all they care about is selling GaaS subscriptions. that explains everything they do. servers they make can be used for AI/GaaS and bring money constantly also they are selling server time to several users simultaneously, so the same silicon is basically sold multiple times, in contrast GPUs are sold once and thats it. no more profit.
so they kill PC gaming, don't make faster GPUs with higher VRAMs and affordable prices and sane gamers are stuck with playing games with morally obsolete engines or on morally obsolete low-res screens, because affordable GPUs are way too slow.
1440p is currently the norm in PC hardware and ngreedia GPUs are way too slow for 1440p gaming, even 4090. ngreedia is killing PC gaming on purpose to sell GaaS that doesn't make sense to PC gamers due to latency.
and AMD is happy to support GPU overprice to sell more console chips to sony/ms (+ continue selling overpriced AF GPUs of course).
the only thing that looks weird is AMD apparently don't understand that without affordable new GPUs that are way faster nobody really needs new CPUs. they shot themselves in the balls by supporting ngreedia's overprice in GPU space and now their CPU sales are way down.
but maybe consoles are just THAT profitable for AMD so they just don't care.
or maybe their CEO is just stupid and was blinded by quick profits. I guess we'll never know
0:36 that's funny because I'd consider ridge a scam
Geforce 2 GTS was the first "gaming" card I got that was a literal game changer for me... I could play in 32 bit color! WOW!
Hoping you do an ATi/AMD version of this. I haven’t owned an nvidia card since the 8800GT and I agree that thing was amazing. With GPU prices the way they are, looks like I’ll be sticking with AMD for “ok” performance compared to the big green. I bought a 6700 non-xt after sticking with a RX 480 for five years because of the cost increase. Still, the 6700 is the most I’ve ever spent on a video card.
I've got a 6700XT and I absolutely love the AMD way. Adrenaline is extremely easy to use and brings that old wacky charm to PCs I think. It was a massive upgrade from my vega 11 ahaaha
Same. I have tried a few nVidia GPUs, but have been on AMD since the 8800GT. Rocking a RX 6800 XT that somehow I managed to beat bots to and get for MSRP on launch day. If that card would have stayed at that price, it would have beaten the RTX 3000 series into dust for most raster games with it's value (it sure has hell beats it for VRChat in VR lol yay VRAM).
I got a used 6800 still in warranty for 400€ recently, sadly the games I play have engine issues more than GPU issues, like kingdom come deliverence, but overall it was a nice upgrade from my vega56, could had waited the 7000's but I was also attracted to the huge vram which are very nice to have since I like to play heavy modded games like fallout4 and skyrim (where vram is king)
Yeah even after the horror show I had with drivers for my last AMD setup (290X crossfire) it looks like my GTX1080 will be getting replaced with and AMD card when the time comes. Prices are absolutely through the roof.
I haven't owned an Nvidia card. ;-)
Personally I think the 980 ti is an S tier card. Got it on launch and used it until about 3 months ago. Beautiful card. My favorite of all time. The 690 was pretty cool too.
I agree, It was just simply a beast for a nice price to allow everything at that point in time. To which one did you upgrade?
The 980 Ti had the best looking cards in Nvidia's history. It even made orange look great.
Yep, still running on my 980 ti, and it does a great job in most games I play at 1440. I'll look to upgrade when the manufacturers get back to reasonable prices, but the 980 ti is so good that I'm in no rush.
my 980ti gigabyte G1, its been running 1080 gaming for 8 years and still rocks.
Been using 2080Super since Q3 2019 but I still have that Gigabyte 980Ti from summer of 2015 as a backup card.
Long ago, I decided to upgrade my GPU, so I wnt and bought a 980Ti. Two weeks later, the 1080 was announced, and I was somewhat disappointed. The 980Ti was great, but I had just missed a much better deal and card overall. Recently, I decided to upgrade that to a better card. Picked out a 2060 Super (due to budget)...and hovered and hesitated over the 'Buy' button. I decided to wait a week. 6 days later, the 30 series was announced, and I breathed a sogh of relief this time. Then card scalping prices happened. Lucky for me, a few weeks after release, I got in and got a 3070 Ti FTW for retail price. Glad I hesitated this time-much happier than I would be with a 3070 Ti than a 2060 Super...
the 970 after the whole 4gb debacle was absolute KING for value, I remember some retailers even selling it for around 200euros on sale! Absolute insane pricing for the performance. Lasted me till I bought a 3070. Because some games really were starting to become unplayable at 1440p even at low.
They were also availlable for 100€ used by the time the RTX cards came out. Cheap but super capable.
just made the same switch yesterday. While the 970 was awesome, its starting to struggle with these new games even at 1080p. Loved that thing to pieces.
I still have my trusty 970 stashed away can't bring myself to get rid of it haha fond memories
Did the same upgrade path
Same for me... The 970 didn't let me down for over 7 years! Just recently replaced it for a 3070.
I'm still rocking a GTX 1080 and have been pretty happy with it. I was really surprised with the VR performance chart that you dropped.
I've been itching to upgrade to a RTX 30 series card but maybe I can hang on a bit longer and see if the prices will get better.
Same here, there's nothing I can't play well at 3440x1440 at 100Hz. I've upgraded CPUs twice (3600 and 5900X) since getting the 1080 but nothing has really felt worthwhile since
@@pieterrossouw8596 3080 is worthwhile bro trust me I'm getting 100fps rdr2 4k
Same here GTX 1080 AIO watercooled without dust on filter easy 50c while in furmark
I'm going to buy in like 2 months a used 3070 for around 360-400$ maybe less will see what can I find
Rx 6xxx is a good option, especially comparing to Rtx 3080.
@@larskoopman3671 yes either one
Something interesting I picked up on was the lack of mention of the 750ti for the 700 series, then the mention of Maxwell debuting in the 900 series, which isn't technically correct. Budget oriented gamers from that era will likely be intimately familiar with the 750ti, and I know I loved the one I had in my first ever small form factor build. It was the real debut of Maxwell, as a followup mid-series release to the 700 series in February of 2014 whereas the 900 series launched months later in September, and was (in my opinion) one of the most interesting cards NVidia ever released. Running a Maxwell powered GM107, it had a pretty damn low TDP (especially for the time) at only 60w, allowing it to be fully bus powered off of the PCIe lane. What does this mean? You could stick it in a cheap prebuilt desktop with no need to worry about power connectors on the PSU. It just worked. It was a single slot card, put out little heat, took little power, and was honestly not even that far behind the 760 for performance in popular titles at the time. As an experimental debut for Maxwell, it absolutely killed it, being a top choice for the budget or size constrained gamer. The fact that it was available at the same time as the similarly insane value Pentium G3258 made for some exciting build possibilities on a shoestring budget, even if those specs can't even run modern titles due to the low core count.
Do however note that the 750ti was Maxwell v1, thus lacking some support and features that Maxwell v2 (900-series) got.
It certainly was a popular card though.
I'm still using a 750ti for gaming and streaming.
The amount of gaming performance I got day one release of the $699 1080 Ti was astronomical. It is definitely the best GPU Nvidia has ever made. Still holding out for another card to replace this legend. Maybe a 5080 Ti or 5090?
Well not for $699.
@@enovationsgr More like $6999 😂
Good trip down memory lane! The 8800 GT was the first GPU I have ever bought on it's own. It replaced some ATI card from my prebuilt Dell.
I still got that piece of history around somewhere.
Correction: I believe that it was the 10 series, not 9, that had desktop dies in laptops with the same name for the first time. The 970M, for example, was really a 960.
They didn't say it used the same name, they said it used the same dies
My best cards over the years were the 8800gts 512mb and my gtx 970. Both fantastic cards that gave fantastic performance for years
Yeah, 8800 was good, but it was, for the time, very pricy, big and power hungry. Seems awfully familiar?
Yeah, I have a GTX 970 running games to this day.
@@SerCommander i had the evga 8800gts 640mb with the g92 chip and it lasted me until i bought a 570 gtx because i was just playing css or wow at that time. I'd say beside the 1080ti the best car i ever bought.
I got a GTX 970 right before the launch of the 10 series and I'm still rocking it to this day.
970? With this vram scandal ?
As one of the few people that copped a 3080 FE at MSRP near release, it's been the single best GPU purchase I've ever made in my life having been building since the mid 2000's. The 1080Ti that now lives in my media machine would be the close runner up, man that thing is still killer for 1080p gaming even with modern games and 4K video.
The first card I bought was the 970. Beside the obvious memory debacle Nvidia dropped the ball on, it was a damn fine card. I got mine in 2015 and didn't get a new card till 2022. If I wasn't in college at the time, I would have loved to pick up a 1080 but I was broke then (as I am now still lol).
im currently using a 970 STILL after buying it around the same time lol. its been a fucking TANK of a card for what it is. i have a 3080 sitting on my shelf waiting on the rest of my parts to be ordered. gonna have to give this 970 a viking funeral or something when my new pc gets built.
Your 'first' card was a 970? That can still run games right now! What are you 12 years old?
I'm still using an R9 290x...I wish I could have afforded a 970...or even able to right now!
@@patrickkilduff5272 lol are you trolling? the 970 came out a year after your 290x, which was about 9 or 10 years ago btw thats a totally reasonable first card at the time when it only cost like 350 new.
@@l8rn3rds still going strong with a new $640 EVGA 980ti bought new at release. shame that 640 wont get you anywhere near a flagship now
I wish you touched more on the 16 series. I had a 1650 Super and loved that thing for $160!
Yeah! I wonder why they skipped that?
I had one too and loved it! I gave it to a friend in need and it's still running great for him
Same, still very happy about the 1660 Super. It's power efficient and offers good bang for buck. That said, the 16 series didn't offer anything new or interesting all things considered, plus it's only the bottom half of the series so it's hard to judge
I had one for a month or two but swapped it for a 2070 super so I could use DLSS
@@lairlair2 yep im still using now even on 1440p which is crazy for a card that cost me less than 300 dollars 5 years ago
This really highlights how many Ws NVidia took over the years against ATi (and later AMD).
Up to the 10 series, NVidia delivered so much performance every few years that gave a reason why people have felt like there wasn't even competition.
Since the pandemic and the scalping situation last year, the market is a mess now. But I'll still fondly remember starting with the old Geforce 2 MX400.
I mean, while Nvidia continues to be a piece of shit, even the 20 series cards outperformed AMD's cards as well as the 30 and current 40 series. They're still taking Ws, just not on price. Because fuck them for that crazy 40 series hike.
That being said, I always used to Game on ATI. I'll never forget how both excited and disappointed I was with ATI's All in Wonder cards. It was awesome being able to capture the video from my cable box to record Anime Unleased from TechTV. But the gaming performance wasn't the best. I ended up buying a second hand Nvidia 6600 from ebay. It ran amazingly well... Until it didn't. It played Morrowind with all the mods perfectly, but Oblivion... It did some of the funkiest shit to the graphics after a while. It'd start glitching out anything with a vertex point until I shut the system down for a bit.
In hindsight, it could have just had bad paste and was over-heating. It wouldn't do it on less demanding games
Yeah. In that regard, they did everything right, unlike Intel with their CPUs.
They continued to improve their GPUs, rather than stagnating until something like Ryzen could happen.
Their prices are definitely absolutely bonkers and they can't crash soon enough, but if they fall down, it's likely not because they release a maybe 2% increase over previous gen
That was my first one too. Nostalgia
Does it though? It's obviously not the point, but the video doesn't go into details and it neglects to mention timelines. Nvidia would often release their generation several months after Ati/AMD, which is a lot of time considering that back then GPU generations were on yearly release cycles. It's not really all that surprising that they often managed to come up with something ever so slightly faster than their competition when they had a bunch of extra time to get the clock speeds exactly right.
The 9000 series absolutely wiped the floor with anything Nvidia could offer for years to come. So much so that 9800 and x800 used a slightly updated architecture with more execution units, yet they were still competitive with Nvidia's offerings. X1000, HD2000 were not great, so Nvidia's 7000 and especially 8000 series did dominate the market. Then Nvidia went on and re-release that generation twice over, so they lost the enormous lead they had. HD3000 was OK then and HD 4000/5000 were in many ways better than GTX 400/500, which were loud and used way more power. HD 7000 and GTX 600 were closely matched, but this is where it starts to fall apart for AMD. They did an Nvidia and re-released that generation twice with only minor changes, so they had little to offer against Nvidia's 700, 900, 10, and 20 series. RX 6000 was then very competitive against the 30 series again.
Out of the 15 or so generations they covered here, Ati/AMD was competitive or had straight up better offerings for 7 of them. It's just that they've had a bit of "dry spell" from 2013 to 2019 and that's what most people remember.
Same, my GeForce 2 MX 400 64GB from Inno3D was an amazing value for OpenGL games like Unreal Tournament (with the S3TC texture pack!). The GeForce 2 GTS never made sense, and EVERYONE I knew was rocking MX 200 and MX 400 cards.
Great list.
In 2014, I had two GTX 760s in SLI and loved them. In 2017 I upgraded to a 1070 and loved the cost/performance. In 2021 I got a 2070 super for $200 and still biding my time until prices aren't ridiculous. With a Samsung Odyssey G7 @ 1440p and 240hz refresh rate, I basically need a 4080 just to get even close to that FPS.
I was really happy with the 9600GT and GTX 460. The 9600GT (cheaper than but almost as fast as a 8800 GT) lasted me till I needed the GTX 460, and the GTX 460 lasted me till the 1050 Ti came out. Now I have a 3060 Ti and considering TSMC's prices I think it's going to last quite a while.
Its not TSMCs fault
I also have a 3060Ti and it's pretty capable card, it surprised me couple times. Will be waiting for next gen probably before upgrading tho
@@deadtake2664 TSMC: prints money, but also needs tens of billions of free dollars from governments that will never be repaid. Consumers not taxpayers should be the ones funding their breakneck roadmap. I'm sick of hearing free market economics advocates rail on about how great it is as they simultaneously hand out free money to for-profit companies.
@@Mr.Morden you’re really underselling what TSMC do, even with all of Nvidias engineering we’d be a generation behind if they were all using Samsung, its 100% Nvidias fault for hiking the prices by 70%, remember that despite the wafer costing more the 4080 and 4070 Ti have much smaller dies that more than offset the 25% wafer cost increase
@@deadtake2664 No, I'm saying taxpayers shouldn't be paying for TSMC's process advantages, TSMC should. I don't care if we would be a generation behind, that's not important. The chip fab industry operated for ages without these massive free money exchanges. The point is for the free market to be a free market. That also means divesting ourselves of non-free labor in non-free markets like China which devalue labor and labor's rights on the whole.
I used GT710 for 5 years. I got in middle school, when I was in a pretty tight budget. I absolutely hated that thing but my computer didn't have integrated graphics at the time so it was a life saver for me lol. I now have HD7950 I got from my dad's friend. It may not be the most powerful card as today but the jump from 710 is unbelievabely huge lol
HD7950 is a good card. There's a ton to play on Steam that will run great.
isn't igpu now better than 7950
@@vipvip-tf9rw yeah a new igpu that they probably dont have
@@gamagama69 you mean Radeon 680M?
@@gamagama69 Yeah i have a Xeon X3450 now, i still don't have igpu lol
The 1080ti is the best card for the money, ever. I sold my 1080ti FTW3 2 days before Christmas for $300 CAD.. 5 years later I recovered 1/3 MSRP. I actually regret selling it.. wish I kept it.
You want mine? It's yours, for a price... =)
3:53 Another thing worth noting was the graphics APIs. ATI cards didn't support bump mapping or other graphical effects that the Nvidia cards did. Some games of the time had most of their textures bump mapped. Imagine playing Doom 3 without bump mapping. Escape from Butcher Bay was another heavily bump mapped title, but most people don't know what that is.
I'd love to see a teir list of general computer hardware. Not in terms of performance, but in terms of how much money reviewing and using said hardware made for LTT in terms of Video monetization.... I do understand that this type of data would be extremely difficult to quantify since LTT uses hardware for many different video's.
This is the best kind of content. just talk about generations of hardware over the years over and over. literally. i re watch all your old videos because I like to relive the memories. love comparing generations and specs! PhysX support started on 8000 series, not 400 series....
Awesome video! I hope you guys will make similar ones for AMD gpus, as well as integrated graphics from all companies (yes, nvidia motherboard chipsets included!), as well as CPUs! I love pieces like this were the info of all this time is put together in such a quick and interesting narrative, helps refresh the memory and fill in the gaps for many older generations of products ^ Even better when you go so far back that names like 3dfx Voodoo, Cyrix etc are mentioned ^
We need an AMD tier list ASAP
I was an early adopter of the 2080 TI. Everyone said I would regret it and I overspent. Well, I sort of did but the situation became more complex.
See, that GPU proceeded to last me through the pandemic and the scalping crisis. I never had a chance to grab a 3XXX card until months ago. Those same people who said I’d regret it instantly regretted not taking the chance to upgrade.
Did I overspend? Yeah.
Did the card do its job well? Actually, yeah. It held up very well for 1440P gaming and only just started to show its age.
Did this card save me from having to buy a scalped 3XXX card? Again, actually yeah.
Sometimes purchases look awful in the moment but end up being more worthwhile over time.
I just hope my new 7900 XTX can fill the same role.
Nice, AMD is currently the best option and will continue to be if NVIDIA doesn't lay off the high throne
I have a similar story, as I managed to build a new gaming rig right before the pandemic with a RTX 2070. Somewhere along the way I had upgraded from an i7 8700K to to i9 9900K, so I wanted to upgrade my video card too... and then the pandemic struck, so I've been stuck with the 2070 ever since.
And I actually have very few complaints despite all the hate it got. The EVGA RTX 2070 Black had a solid price (I snagged it for under $500 on Newegg) and it's only gotten more competent over time as drivers matured and DLSS/Ray-tracing became more mainstream. For a first-gen attempt, it handles ray-tracing shockingly well now (as long as DLSS is on, which is great for fps but a mixed bag for fidelity).
So while the RTX 20 series might not have shined during its time in the spotlight, it's managed grow into a solid workhorse for 1440p and ray-tracing to this day.
Agree. I buy my 2070 for a lower price and it was better investment then 2070s which came at same time when I buying 2070 hence price drop.
I got a 3070 FE a few weeks after launch for MSRP, and it's been a killer card. I approve the S tier ranking
Especially with DLSS, the 3070 is KILLER for the money.
I still maintain that with the die shrink and everything the 8800 GT was almost a pre-rebrand of the 9800 GT. It was absolutely crazy and deserves its own mention as an absolute price/perf legend.
Wow you brought me back Linus! I remember sitting on the school bus in high school reading the computer paper and always turning straight to the NCIX section and drooling over info. I first met you in 2003! Wow has time flown by…
Really happy with the 3080 I got as MSRP when it launched. A good card to wait if maybe 50xx will be a return to form. 20xx and 40xx are similar in being not a bad product, but just a bad price.
20, 30 and 40 are basically all the same in that regard - if you could get a good price, then you're not going to be unhappy with the product.
With 30 is was whether or not you could get MSRP, and with 20 series, it was when the 30 series was 1st announced and 20 series became cheap in anticipation of the 30.
For 40 series... well there's just no good pricing yet really
Same here 3080 for 699 Euro in germany.
Bought 15 min after launch but had to wait 6 weeks until i received it
30 minite video + a couple dozen comments and this is the closest i get to an answer as to which card to Actually get
@@NeroThacher get a 12gb if you're gonna get a 3080
if you can actually get them at msrp then 30 or 40 series are by far the best
While it makes sense that you started with the FX series, I can't help but wish you started a bit earlier. I still remember going to my local PC shop to buy my first GPU upgrade and having to convince the vendor that "yes, I want the GeForce 4 TI 4200. Not the 4MX and definitely not the 2MX. I want that 4 TI." 😅
So it would've been nice to hear LTT's opinion on that series of cards.
I wanted to see my old Riva TNT (or was it TNT2?) on that list! =)
I think I went from Voodoo -> Riva TNT (maybe TNT2) -> GeForce 2 Pro, then switched to ATI/AMD until I replaced a failed 7970 with a GTX 770, then 1080 -> 1080 Ti (working in gaming I had a great chance to upgrade in fast succession there) -> 3080 now (launch pricing, so great deal).
Yeah, I thought the same thing.
GeForce 3 was a pretty big deal too along with the launch of Doom 3; touting its' programmable shaders.
It's difficult to set a starting point for a video of course, but not starting with the GeForce 256 seems strange, since this entire video is filled with that name.
Though I feel TNT2 is what really put nVidia on the map to start with, I can understand wanting to keep the naming homogenous.
But FX? That would never have been my choice.
The S ranking is exactly what I was thinking before watching the video. 6800LE, 8800GT, 1070 and 3080 (at MSRP) were my favorite cards by far!
arent people kinda f... over with 10gb vram in 3080 though ?
@@tomzplI mean… kinda. These days, if you want a good graphics card. They don’t give it to you just like that. Before, it used to be, pay and get great performance. Now, it’s pay for great performance but we take something useful out of it.
@@tomzpl It depends on the settings you put it on. The higher the settings, the resolution, the amount of mods you use, and if you use Ray Tracing the more it affects the VRAM. I know people are shitting on 10 & 8 GB VRAM right now, but it's really not that big of a deal for the vast majority of games. The great thing about PC games is that you can always lower the settings if you want to play the game.
Moving from a 970 to this 1080Ti gave me the same winning feeling as going from a Matrox (Mystique?) to a 3DFX Voodoo card years before. Like my old Sandy Bridge 2500K, the 1080Ti has been one of my best upgrade choices.
Yep, I did the SAME switch the day the 1080ti was released. I was playing a lot of VR at the time, so I needed ALL of the GPU power I could get!
I'd love to see an expansion of this video idea, which covers the competition between AMD/ATi and Nvidia over the generation. Mentioning which brand had the best flagship, mid-range, and budget of their era. And any notable technology / feature differences.
my first card was a 980 which went into my first gaming PC. It actually lasted me like 8 years, just upgraded to a 3070 this year.
I built the wifes PC in 2014 got her 2 980's in Sli, that lasted a good few years, in fact she now has 2 Maxwell Titan X in Sli, that I took from my workstation, I now have a 24 core Threadripper, and 3090 I got for £1450 at release (Im a film maker) but the point is, neither of us need to upgrade for a long while, as both our PC's do everything we need them to do.
I held on to my 1060 (it's actully ok at medium to high settings at 1080p for most modern games).. I just upgraded to 3070ti.. but now I wish I have waited a bit more for the more RTX efficient and more mature 4070 or 4080...
I really wished those Crypto Miner Scalpers have all Cancer now and I am happy for the ones who lost their money because of scalping the RTX30 series... They ruined it. But it's all done now I guess.
Same, the gtx 980 worked great for me those 8 years. Now i upgraded to a RTX 4090 xD, the price is insane but its also a monster for 4k Gaming.
I’m still rocking my 980M on my ASUS ROG G751JY Laptop circa ~2015 and I’m still able to play the latest games without too many problems.
Granted I’m not playing on 4K but rather 1080p but still most of the time the settings are set to high/ultra/custom and really no issues.
Except the battery on my laptop died years ago so now it’s basically just a stationary battlestation laptop…
honestly still torn about how I’ll even upgrade, probably looking to get another similarly quality laptop but with probably a GTX 3080 minimum which has me wondering which laptops even have a card like that and a 17” screen.
XD but I reckon I still got time to do my research lol
When you say "it lasted" does that mean it died? What signs/symptoms did you encounter?
I think my 1070ti was the ONLY card on this list that I didn't get burned on, I seemed to always upgrade in the B to D list.
I still run mine (not TI), insane value for the money ( 320€ at launch), which was a bit pricier than the rx480, but in my experience the 480 was absolutely horrible to use. I got a card that had a TON of artifacts, swapped to another 480, kept with same driver issues and swapped it to the 1070 till now.
Still not even close to the value i got for my asus 660, which was running star wars battlefront (the lootbox one) at 100+ fps. A monster of a card
I went from a 260, to a 660ti, to a 970, then finally a 1080..... legit loved my 1080, such an amazing card. Was actually able to run 4k 60fps in games like battlefield 1. That was the moment I truly realized how amazing games could look
So much nostalgia here, I remember reading reviews off a PC mag about 8800GTX and 2900XT, that was pretty key in inspiring me to work in computer engineering
One big keynote from the gtx 6000 series was the ability to flash the bios of the 6800 to 6800 GT speeds. Easy to do, and saved a few bucks!
My GTX Titan is still running - my wife uses it daily for Destiny 2 and it still works. Kind of mind blowing.
Honestly, I wasn’t going to watch this video. I thought that a GPU tier list would be pretty silly when faster is obviously better.
I appreciate the more nuanced take on the ranking system. I’m also impressed with the amount of history packed into this 20 minute video.
If this is the kind of quality we can expect from an LTT tier list video, I’m on board. Keep up the good work, LTT team!
It would have been boring if it was just a list, but the history bits made me enjoy it.
Lots has changed in graphics cards in 20 years.
The supply issues with the 30 series led me to buy from a system integrator for the first time since the mid 2000s. I was able to get a 5600x and a 3070 for barely more than what the scalpers were selling 3070s for by themselves.
Trying your hand at a laptop was also an option. Of course, expecting a 15-25% performance hit and loud fans are a given but hey you can still get the features and a good portion of the performance for relatively cheap
@@amistrophy Yeah i bought a RTX 3080 laptop for the same price as a RTX 3070/80 on its own at the time
I bought into RTX with a 2060 founders edition. Honestly I was so blown away by even the 40fps I would get in ray tracing titles and all the tech demos at the time, that I really didn't mind the ridiculous performance hit. But DLSS has really saved that card. I'm still using it, and I can easily play games at 1440p max/high settings with DLSS enabled. Great technology. I've wanted to upgrade for a while, it just hasn't seemed worth dropping nearly 1000 bucks on a new GPU.
Same. I'm rocking a 2060 Super Ventus GP OC and couldn't be happier for what I play.
Seriously, who comes up with the names for these things?
I’m using an overclocked 2060 still on a just below 1080p monitor. Way more powerful than needed to max my games out
Man, same story with my 2070. I got a 4K OLED, and DLSS makes it all possible even with some Cyberpunk in RTX.
That was the all point of the Turing architecture, and when you see the prices now.. it was THE gen to get
For me the 4000 series will most likely be my first upgrade since I got my GTX 980. The 980 is an absolute monster of a card but sadly has really started to trail behind.
To me the 4000 series definitely looks like a great replacement and will kinda future proof my system for years to come, like the 980 did.
My 980ti just broke recently, I can only play older less taxing games, or my computer crashes.
@@wulffenstein7249 Oh no! RIP 980 TI :(
I hope she was a great working beast for the years of service.
I just retired my 980. It had been in my system for about 6 years.
@@retro_88yota RIP :< One of the best cards ever build.
@@KMichiyu yeah I was doing a pretty big system upgrade but I noticed that the PCB had bent like 1/2 an inch from front to back due to the weight from the cooler. I decided to retire it while it is still working.