When were the biggest leaps in graphics cards performance?

[P4-630]

As the title says, when were the biggest leaps in graphics cards performance for Nvidia and Ati/AMD?

 

[hojnikb]

I'd say 8000 series was pretty great at the time.

 

[gasolina]

As the title says, when were the biggest leaps in graphics cards performance for Nvidia and Ati/AMD?

as for AMD i think from 3850/3870 to 4850/4870 and again from 4850/4850 to 5850/5870, 6950/6970 to 7950/7970 and that's that
for Nvidia i think from gt7950 to 8800ultra , GT285 to GT480, gt580 to gtx680, 980 to 1080 .
Nvidia really whooped AMD with the 8000/9000 series that crushed amd hd 2000,3000

 

[Jetster]

Nope the Nvidia 6600Gt / 6800 Ultra

ATI X800

Nothing prior compared

 

[Vayra86]

3DFX

Nothing could hold a candle to that at the time and the GPU's that could handle that, had no equal in games that supported it.

All the rest was just incremental updates of arch and processing power really... The big leaps happened at the beginning when Matrox was still in the game too.

And before we go offtopic; no, DX12 is not the same.

 

[D007]

I'd say 8000 series was pretty great at the time.

I agree. I feel like the 8800 gtx was a huge leap.

 

[hojnikb]

I agree. I feel like the 8800 gtx was a huge leap.

Pretty much. Bought 8800GTX 512 back in 2008 i believe and lasted me all the way to 2012
Bought 460 then and was pretty great too.

Currently running iGPU in eager wait for new gpus

 

[dorsetknob]

Biggest improvement came when Cards started to Support Duel monitors
FROM that Time Cards that only had one display became so Meeha
Duel Display Ever since

 

[qubit]

As the title says, when were the biggest leaps in graphics cards performance for Nvidia and Ati/AMD?

Good question. I think 3dfx days or NVIDIA 8800GTX perhaps.

That decade old NVIDIA bad boy is so powerful that I can still play games quite well on it today. With limitations, obviously.

 

[EarthDog]

My biggest improvement was that I went from a Ati Powercolor X1950Pro to a Gigabyte HD3870 GDDR4

Im confused... are you asking about our experience in the biggest jump or the biggest generational improvements? Your title and first post say one thing, then you chime in with your personal biggest upgrade?

I agree. I feel like the 8800 gtx was a huge leap.

This... when that 8800GTX and 8800GTX Ultra came out, those were pretty big leaps at the time...

 

[P4-630]

Im confused... are you asking about our experience in the biggest jump or the biggest generational improvements? Your title and first post say one thing, then you chime in with your personal biggest upgrade?

Whoops, my bad, and there were HD2xxx cards after the X1950 Pro

Edit: Forgot the fact there were HD2xxx cards as well

 

[GoldenX]

Ifyou look at IGPs, nothing beats the DX10 ones from AMD, the HD3000 destroyed the competition.

 

[kcajjones]

I know this is an old thread, but Google came up with this when I was looking for an answer and I felt like I had to add...

I can't believe no one has mentioned the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro! That graphics card lasted me a good 6 years! (admittedly games only ran at low settings by the time I upgraded).
At the time of release, way back in 2002, I went from my Geforce 4 ti 4600 playing at 1024x768 with high settings, to playing at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 with 16xaf and 6xaa! It literally powered though every game and had so much more memory bandwidth that it's the first card where anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering became proper features for the latest games and not something just to make old games look better.

 

[Wavetrex]

I would say that the most significant changes (or leaps) were:

- Introduction of true Hardware accelerated Windows UI ( S3 Trio 64 ) - Before it (and similar), windows was redrawing every pixel via the CPU
- 3DFx Voodoo, the dawn of realtime 3D rendering
- nVidia Riva TNT probably, the first superscalar GPU ( which was capable of doing 2 texels per clock, that's where it got it's name: TwiN-Texel )
- Nvidia GeForce 3, first card with programable pixel shaders (which made "reflective water" in games like Half-Life 2 look somewhat "realistic", and it was AMAZING at that time)
- XBox 360 (With ATI Gpu), first with unified shaders (universal 32-bit floating point compute units) - Followed on PC by GeForce 8 (aka Nvidia TESLA)
- The jump to 14nm (Pascal) which had a MASSIVE impact in clock speeds compared to what was possible for previous generation
- Realtime Raytracing (future), I don't consider RTX a true raytracing card yet... it's just a hybrid attempting something very poorly.

That's about it, everything else was incremental updates.

 

[GoldenX]

I would say that the most significant changes (or leaps) were:

- Introduction of true Hardware accelerated Windows UI ( S3 Trio 64 ) - Before it (and similar), windows was redrawing every pixel via the CPU
- 3DFx Voodoo, the dawn of realtime 3D rendering
- nVidia Riva TNT probably, the first superscalar GPU ( which was capable of doing 2 texels per clock, that's where it got it's name: TwiN-Texel )
- Nvidia GeForce 3, first card with programable pixel shaders (which made "reflective water" in games like Half-Life 2 look somewhat "realistic", and it was AMAZING at that time)
- XBox 360 (With ATI Gpu), first with unified shaders (universal 32-bit floating point compute units) - Followed on PC by GeForce 8 (aka Nvidia TESLA)
- The jump to 14nm (Pascal) which had a MASSIVE impact in clock speeds compared to what was possible for previous generation
- Realtime Raytracing (future), I don't consider RTX a true raytracing card yet... it's just a hybrid attempting something very poorly.

That's about it, everything else was incremental updates.

You could add the PPU from the NES, the first chip designed for (sprite) graphics.

 

[Fouquin]

- Introduction of true Hardware accelerated Windows UI ( S3 Trio 64 ) - Before it (and similar), windows was redrawing every pixel via the CPU

I don't know how true that is, there were already windows accelerators like the Tseng Labs ET4000/W32, and GUI accelerators like ATi's Mach 32 and Matrox's MGA Ultima in 1992 and 1993 respectively, both predating the Trio family of cards.

- 3DFx Voodoo, the dawn of realtime 3D rendering

Just for clarity, real time 3D at the consumer level. SGi, 3DLabs, Evans&Sutherland, and Dynamic Pictures all had real-time 3D accelerator boards or workstations before Voodoo hit the market.

 

[Wavetrex]

@Fouquin well, it is a "biggest leaps in graphics cards" thread. Obviously super-workstations and supercomputers can do things differently, like those you mentioned.
I said "and similar". Most of those chips were doing acceleration on different levels, but I think Trio 64 series were the first ones that had full DirectX 2D support built into hardware, including bitmap scaling and rotation.
I might be wrong though, and other (slower) ones before also had this ability.

@GoldenX Yes, that NES chip was also amazing, in the time where the other consoles and home computers were only capable of copying memory bytes one by one via the slow as molasses 8-bit CPU.
Thanks for the completion !

 

[phanbuey]

8800GTX (nvidia Tesla as mentioned above)...

pascal was huge too, but the G80 was shocking when it came out. And that one card stayed top dog for basically 3 years until the GTX280 came out.

 

[Zubasa]

I would say that the most significant changes (or leaps) were:

- Introduction of true Hardware accelerated Windows UI ( S3 Trio 64 ) - Before it (and similar), windows was redrawing every pixel via the CPU
- 3DFx Voodoo, the dawn of realtime 3D rendering
- nVidia Riva TNT probably, the first superscalar GPU ( which was capable of doing 2 texels per clock, that's where it got it's name: TwiN-Texel )
- Nvidia GeForce 3, first card with programable pixel shaders (which made "reflective water" in games like Half-Life 2 look somewhat "realistic", and it was AMAZING at that time)
- XBox 360 (With ATI Gpu), first with unified shaders (universal 32-bit floating point compute units) - Followed on PC by GeForce 8 (aka Nvidia TESLA)
- The jump to 14nm (Pascal) which had a MASSIVE impact in clock speeds compared to what was possible for previous generation
- Realtime Raytracing (future), I don't consider RTX a true raytracing card yet... it's just a hybrid attempting something very poorly.

That's about it, everything else was incremental updates.

Tessellation finally becoming standard with HD 5870 / DX11 should be in there somewhere.
Oh and HDRR lighting from DirectX 9.0c. With the first cards that supports HDRR lighting + AA concurently being the ATi X1000 series.
These features are so widely in use today that you kind of not even think much about them.

Edit: Speaking of lighting in games the Geforce 256 was the first card to support hardware Transform & Lighting. DirectX 7 later made that standard.

 

[AsRock]

8800GTX and before that ATI 9700\9800 along with 3DFX

 

[qubit]

8800GTX (nvidia Tesla as mentioned above)...

pascal was huge too, but the G80 was shocking when it came out. And that one card stayed top dog for basically 3 years until the GTX280 came out.

I've got an 8800 GTX and it still performs quite well today, it's that awesome. You've got to stay within its limitations of course, or it runs out of memory with only 768MB, but it still works very smoothly. I've also got the 8800 Ultra, which is that little bit faster.

 

[Fouquin]

it is a "biggest leaps in graphics cards" thread. Obviously super-workstations and supercomputers can do things differently, like those you mentioned.

I mentioned those specifically because a lot were single add-in accelerator boards, generally indistinguishable from a standard graphics card. Dynamic Pictures V192, 3DLabs GLiNT based ELSA Gloria-4, E&S Freedom 6000, etc. They were just thousands of dollars for similar practical performance. 3Dfx didn't intend for Voodoo to make insane leaps in 3D performance, they intended to bring existing 3D performance down to a price everyone could afford (mostly to spite SGi). It did just that. Obviously they threw in their own special sauce to sweeten the deal, but the tech wasn't new.

If the consumer PC market of the time was in a vacuum with no sight or sound of the big players in 3D accelerators, it would definitely appear as though 3Dfx dropped from the heavens above and delivered a technology that had never been seen before. Not to downplay their efforts, they were still THE company to up-heave the industry as a whole and drag that cutting edge tech down to the masses.

 

[Rockarola]

I have nothing to add, except that seeing Tseng Labs, S3, Matrox, 3DFX and Riva TNT mentioned makes me feel like a kid again...building computers is a lot easier these days, but I had so much fun back then, subscribing to 5 different magazines, going to 8 different stores to find the right PSU/RAM/GPU/whatever.
Building your own was certainly a bit more challenging, sometimes extremely frustrating, but it wasn't a war between fanboys...if it worked, you could be proud.
(this episode of "walking uphill both ways" was brought to you by an aging geek...now will you please GET OFF MY LAWN!)

 

[eidairaman1]

Nope the Nvidia 6600Gt / 6800 Ultra

ATI X800

Nothing prior compared

R300 -9700 Pro

 

[Jetster]

R300 -9700 Pro

Ok I change my mind. The AGP slot