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What do you think was the most influential card in the last few years.

bru said:
Err if Nvidia couldn't manufacture a proper large chip then how come they were able to make the titan ;)


Most influential card over the last few years, Hmmm. Well discounting the 8800 as I agree with others that it is going back to far.

I would say the prize should go jointly to the mid range concept 680 for being able to beat the top dog from the other side the original 7970, and of course the 7970 itself for being introduced with the rather low clocks that allowed the 680 to come in where it did.
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If you believe Rroff that the 7970 was in fact a mid range design itself then the gtx680 does not look so good anymore. Any how i am certainly not going down that route.

It's hard to say without a timeline. If g80 is indeed in there i would say 8800gtx. I think the 4870 and 5870 were great value cards for there performance. Both of these influenced pricing on the Nvidia side so they certainly had influence.
 
If we are talking recent years as in no more then 3 then the Caustic Series2 R2500 was one off the most influential cards. It changed a lot.
 
Rroff said:
Would have to agree that the 8800GTX and 8800GT have still been the most influential cards of the last few years even though almost a decade old.

The leap in performance and feasibility of many shader effects that previously either weren't possible or not possible with decent performance pushed rendering tech forward more than anything since and the impact of those cards is only really starting to fade away in the last couple of years or so.

Following on from that the GTX480 due to making tessellation feasible - while not a big fan of tessellation myself and its not been overly used itself it seemed to be the catalyst for developers pushing related/newer tech.

The 290 influencing the 780 price drop is another valid one in there.

Overall though I don't think we've really seen hugely influential cards over the last few years - the Titan had a bit of an impact on multi display gaming due to the sudden leap in what was viable performance wise with multi display/high resolutions but rendering tech wise not so much as it was in some ways an anomaly and developers wouldn't focus on it at the expense of more mainstream cards in that regard.



While theres nothing to confirm it - "leaked" "7870" slides (which are almost certainly real) had the 7970 specs and projected release date on them. (Before the actual releases).
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If you look at how Amd have been in the market you can see things. Essentially the biggest proof to Amd's marketing, releasing with lower clocks than needed. Never have Amd released a gcard with so much overclocking headroom.

Waiting purposely 6 months then magically offering a bios upgrade to hit 1ghz, (for people who can't overclock)
Then at same time ghz edition cards were made. Were the initial lower clocks, to extend their own product lifetime knowing 28nm was hard to make at full fat, or to help Nvidia market their own mid range offerings?

6 months from that we then see the famous cat 12, drivers,
So after almost 1 year exactly we now see the full potential of the 7970, although prior to driver update, if you weren't blinded by reviews at stock speeds (925/1ghz+ boost) and you did your own overclocking at 1150mhz plus, you could still beat a 670/680 with overclocking but some games the 680 still had the edge.

Then for 2013 well we all know about the 8800 oem rebrand year, pretty similar to 2014 rebrand year,
But of course Amd were experiementing with gcn 1.1.
Experimenting with Bonaire, 7790 etc .
 
I'm not totally sure what to suggest, so I guess I'll just say what sprung to mind first : the 7850 = great value for money coupled with superb overclocking performance / GCN tech?
 
bru said:
Err if Nvidia couldn't manufacture a proper large chip then how come they were able to make the titan ;)


Most influential card over the last few years, Hmmm. Well discounting the 8800 as I agree with others that it is going back to far.

I would say the prize should go jointly to the mid range concept 680 for being able to beat the top dog from the other side the original 7970, and of course the 7970 itself for being introduced with the rather low clocks that allowed the 680 to come in where it did.
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Nvidia were in july 2013, it was the Quadro K6000, priced accordingly for obvious manufacturing reasons similar to Ibm power series. Hence the delay to the consumer market, slightly gimped. gtx 780 then 780ti full fat
 
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the cards that made a decent impact for me regarding performance/cool running and overclockability/value for money

were the

7850 and 7970,before that it was the 5770 card

not everyone buys on launch or close to launch day either,i waited a good year n half for my 7970
 
The HD5850/HD5870. Not only were they a massive performance increase,but had decent overclockability,decent power consumption and also enabled cheap multi-monitor gaming.

They were also the last cheap top end card too. After that the top end cards started going up in price.

Plus despite being old cards,they are still viable for many games even now.
 
Five.Stars said:
Well I got mines on launch day (Powercolour), for £416. And it was from 1 of those retailers listed on that article. I got it for £30 cheaper than it is listed at.
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Same here from ocuk just 11 days after that article

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CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The HD5850/HD5870. Not only were they a massive performance increase,but had decent overclockability,decent power consumption and also enabled cheap multi-monitor gaming.

They were also the last cheap top end card too. After that the top end cards started going up in price.

Plus despite being old cards,they are still viable for many games even now.
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+1
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The HD5850/HD5870. Not only were they a massive performance increase,but had decent overclockability,decent power consumption and also enabled cheap multi-monitor gaming.

They were also the last cheap top end card too. After that the top end cards started going up in price.

Plus despite being old cards,they are still viable for many games even now.
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It was either this or a 4870, (if not too old) for me as it was the real Ati fighting performance and price and real competition against Nvidia. Also noting Ati's development in manufacturing gddr5 high speed memory on a 256bit, whereas Nvidia went very wide on gddr3. Which we owe a lot of todays memory bandwidth to ati.

the 5850/70 was just perfectly excecuted where as Nvidia was horrendous.
 
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IT depends on what you mean by influential? Could the Titan really be called influential because to the vast majority of gamers it wasn't affordable.

Can the 7970 be called influential? As it had a pretty high price on release.

The 680? Made AMD release 1Ghz editions and lower the price of theirs?

The 290? which has brought affordable gaming, mantle, true audio and made NVidia lower their prices.

Well as you can see there are lots of contenders, but for me, the most influential cards in a long time are the HD 4xxx cards from AMD, if I had to pick one, then it would be the HD 4870. First card to use GDDR5 memory. Also the release of those cards brought much needed competition back into the graphics card industry. I can't think of any card/cards that have had as much impact on the Graphic card market in recent years.
 
for me it was the 7970, It is a card that lasted a hell of a long time. and people still use them nowadays.

TITAN was a stupidly priced card that had no place, apart from in PC's of those who had money to burn
 
the 5870 ran hot,only thing that made me get rid,that and they wouldn't oc much

5770 offered good value and ran cool,but the 7 series was a huge leap in comparison

my 7970 ended up costing £160 after I sold all the bundled games
 
Well seeing as "recent years" seems to be a very vague term, we might as well say Voodoo. After that, the 6600gt. Then the 8800s, the 460, 69xx, Titan, and most recently the 750ti.
 
melmac said:
IT depends on what you mean by influential? Could the Titan really be called influential because to the vast majority of gamers it wasn't affordable.

Can the 7970 be called influential? As it had a pretty high price on release.

The 680? Made AMD release 1Ghz editions and lower the price of theirs?

The 290? which has brought affordable gaming, mantle, true audio and made NVidia lower their prices.

Well as you can see there are lots of contenders, but for me, the most influential cards in a long time are the HD 4xxx cards from AMD, if I had to pick one, then it would be the HD 4870. First card to use GDDR5 memory. Also the release of those cards brought much needed competition back into the graphics card industry. I can't think of any card/cards that have had as much impact on the Graphic card market in recent years.
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It didn't check my post a bit higher up 420 on release is cheap!
 
Mr. May said:
It didn't check my post a bit higher up 420 on release is cheap!
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IS that all you took from my post? I don't care what price you got the 7970 at, It was still expensive compared the price points that AMD had previously launched at and was too expensive compared to the 680 which forced AMD to reduce the price.

But, as I said it wasn't a contender for me for most influential card.

My winner is the 4870, for GDDR5 and amazing price and performance.

Go bring your price argument to someone who actually picked the 7970.
 
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