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

Good lord, I actually came into this thread thinking it would be interesting, yet all I see are AMD and nVidia owners picking their current fanboy colours, its cringeworthy.
I suggest you read again not everyone picked AMD or NVidia :)

But your are right . Most of the cards picked shouldn't be in the list of most influential.
 
Personally I don't think any have been. Sure Titan made people take notice but thats about it.
What about the Caustic Series2 R2500? That completely changed the market it’s in. Well over triple the speed of competitors for a fraction of the price. Along with all its other advantages.
 
TNT2 Ultra
Was before it's time and still eats games like crysis 3 on maxed settings..!
around 15 years on and still no need to upgrade;)
 
TO be an influential card you need to be considerably faster than the card below you and you have to be priced reasonably in order to influence a lot of people into buying it. You don't see many titan users.

You don't really need to be either of those things, I think your confusing being influential with being popular or being a leap in technology. Influential just means it has had a big impact on the course of the GPU industry and I think it's fair to say that Titan had a bigger impact than anything since probably the HD5870.

If Nvidia hadn't decided to push the boundaries just for the sake of it (at the time they had no idea Titan would outsell the GTX690 so well and spawn the 780/780Ti) and just stuck with the GTX680 perhaps tweaking it to compete better with the 7970GHz, then AMD would never have changed their mind about producing a HD7990, and probably not launched the 290/290X either.

We could have been sitting here today waiting on Maxwell and AMD's equivalent, with the HD7970 GHz and some GTX680ti as the two flagships with just the stupidly priced GTX690 out above them. But instead we have a whole tier (or two depending on how you look at the gap between the 780/290 and 780ti/290x) available to us, that is down to the influence Titan had on the direction of the industry.
 
4870X2 influenced me into never buying another dual card again. :D :cool:

Paid £350, packed up just after going EOL, the Bolton lads offered me a £50 credit. Scum...
 
nVidia 8800GT without a doubt. Epic card! Possibly the 5900Ultra... that was the card that I benched most to break 20k in 3DMark03... amazing nights with the PC half hanging out of a window with an AMD 2500 Mobile CPU!
 
5800-5900 were a disaster for Nvidia even broken DX8.1 so fell back to DX8 AFAIR but that is what happens when new tech jump arrives.
 
The GTX 480, it was hot power hungry, but what a monster. Still able to play games at decent settings today years after release.

Yup, just recently replaced my pair with a couple of 290s. Like-for-like :p

Most influential for me would have to be G80. Still have my BFG 8800GTX with EnzoTech Waterblock. Nothing since has impressed me to the same extent, not even Titan.
 
If you really want to go back as far as 10 to 12 years ago,the 9700 PRO and the cut down 9500 series were extremely long lived and you could argue revolutionary for the time.

Basically,these are the most influential cards of the last few 10 to 12 years:
1.)9700 PRO/cut down 9500 derivatives -longetivity. Helped push forward DX9 adoption.
2.)8800GTX -longetivity. Was not matched in performance by a single GPU card for ages by AMD. It took the HD4850 to do that after 19 months.
3.)8800GT - brought high end peformance at a decent price. Longetivity.
4.)HD4870/HD4850 - caused pricing in the market to crash,meaning we had £300 dual GPU cards. The AMD small die strategy was itself an out of the box way of thinking,which caught Nvidia by surprise.
5.)HD5850/HD5870 - longevity,performance and pricing. Helped push forward DX11 adoption.

After that,the process node issus hit and we have been stuck with even more drawn out performance and pricing taking ages to settle down.

The influential cards are those which are generally priced well,so many people can buy them and as a result it pushes the market forward.

The 8800GTX is the only expensive card in the list since AMD had no single GPU answer for like 19 months. Even after two years,only few graphics cards were capable of beating it convincingly.

Geforce Titan is a nice piece of engineering but in reality has none of the impact the 8800GTX had,especially due to its insane price(worse than the 8800GTX),and the fact by the time Nvidia dropped the price,with the GTX780,AMD had the R9 290/R9 290X coming in a mere few months later which cratered pricing.

The 9700 PRO and 8800GTX are probably the two greatest high end cards if you include the last 10 to 12 years.
 
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