A brief History of Video Cards

[great_big_abyss]

An Excellent roundup of video cards from the past 5 years:

Hardware.info - A brief history of video cards - 64 Video cards tested

They benchmarked 64 cards using current drivers and benchmarks. Granted, the benchmarks don't go into super high detail, in most instances they used one resolution/setting per bench, but it does give you a very good idea of where how your old 3870 stacks up against the newest 7970 GHZ edition.

Interesting, but note where the GTX295 ends up...comparable to a 560Ti in most benches, and in the last bench, more powerful than a 680!
(boy I sure wish there was a GTX295 for sale in the BST for a very good price)

All joking (kinda) aside, it's still a great article.

[Bond007]

Great read. Thanks for the post

[GalaxyTech]

Very interesting article. It's not easy making even a remotely accurate comparison across more than a couple generations of hardware. I'm surprised the 8400GS could even run BF3 at those settings reliably enough to benchmark. The hardest part about comparing cards 5 generations apart is that if you can find something slim enough for the old card to run, it often won't be taxing enough to give a good impression of what the new card can do. Good read, though. Reminds me how badly I need to go ahead and dump my old laptop with 9300m graphics in the recycle bin. Thanks for sharing.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by GalaxyTech

Very interesting article. It's not easy making even a remotely accurate comparison across more than a couple generations of hardware. I'm surprised the 8400GS could even run BF3 at those settings reliably enough to benchmark. The hardest part about comparing cards 5 generations apart is that if you can find something slim enough for the old card to run, it often won't be taxing enough to give a good impression of what the new card can do. Good read, though. Reminds me how badly I need to go ahead and dump my old laptop with 9300m graphics in the recycle bin. Thanks for sharing.

Hrmmm... what's that say about the age of my compaq laptop with dedicated ATI Mobility 9200 graphics? ;)

[great_big_abyss]

I think they should have included Skyrim. Since that game is a DX9 game, it would have run (albeit as a slideshow on some cards) on every single card there.

[Bond007]

Now that I had some time to look through it better I really like it. Shows me where my gtx460 slots in nicely.

[GalaxyTech]

Originally Posted by sswilson

Hrmmm... what's that say about the age of my compaq laptop with dedicated ATI Mobility 9200 graphics? ;)

Ok, you win for hanging on even longer than me then. Could be worse though, could be Intel.

[SolidCree]

Thanks for this post. Finally puts the cards in perspective for me.

Good to see that 7870 amd radeon beats a GTX 660 Ti

[Skyllz]

Awesome post.

Even if the methodology is not 100%, it still gives a very good ballpark of what sits where across generations.

Even by todays standard, my overclocked 560ti448(+- a 570) is not "slow" but it's still in no benchmark anywhere, how am I supposed to know if a 660 would be a great improvement or not over it if it's not benchmarked anywhere.