Worst GPUs of All Time?

[Leyawiin]

Everything ATI produced between the X1900 series and the HD 4000 series.

 

[crisium]

A card no one mentioned yet is HD4850. Popular then and well reviewed... but had high idle temp (70c) for reference card and load of 95c. I had a gtx 470 reference based card, load temps were about 90c and hated it due to fan noise. Any hot and loud card in my view is a fail, regardless of how well it performs.

No way was the 4850 a bad card. I didn't even get mine at launch but got 33 months out of it (upgraded just before Battlefield 3, used it from Dec 2008 to Sep 2011). I didn't have reference though.

What made the 4850 so good was its value. People look at the 8800GT as disruptive - and it was. But the 4850 was actually a reward to people who waited. 8800GT launched at $250 but was often price inflated to near $300 for a few months. Just 8 months after the 8800GT launched we got the 4850 for only $200 and it was about 15% faster.

Not saying anything negative about the legendary 8800GT, but if anyone waited they got more for less with the 4850. Heat/noise was little issue with an aftermarket.

 

[thilanliyan]

In recent history one of the worst cards ever is the r9 290x.... pretty ridicolous...runs hot as hell 95+ degrees, 300W, sounds like a plane taking off...and if that wasnt unfortunate enough it was even slower compared to the competition..

I disagree. I have been running a 290 since 2013 and it still performs pretty well at 1200p, plus it is still a beast for mining. My 2 290s have been mining 24/7 for 3 yrs now and haven't missed a beat, and have paid for themselves many times over. Reference card noise was definitely a letdown but price was fine initially.
290(x) cannot be the "Worst GPU".
I'd say the biggest disappointment after a ton of hype was the 2900XT.

 

[Headfoot]

I disagree. I have been running a 290 since 2013 and it still performs pretty well at 1200p, plus it is still a beast for mining. My 2 290s have been mining 24/7 for 3 yrs now and haven't missed a beat, and have paid for themselves many times over. Reference card noise was definitely a letdown but price was fine initially.
290(x) cannot be the "Worst GPU".
I'd say the biggest disappointment after a ton of hype was the 2900XT.

yeah, its a troll post, let's not feed him

 

[Grooveriding]

gtx 480

 

[Pariah]

ATI Rage Fury Maxx. My sister was the only person I knew who owned one. I have nothing positive to say about that card. Arguably the worst supported card ever released by either ATI/AMD or Nvidia.

 

[DrMrLordX]

ATI Rage Fury Maxx. My sister was the only person I knew who owned one. I have nothing positive to say about that card. Arguably the worst supported card ever released by either ATI/AMD or Nvidia.

Hah! I was wondering if someone would mention that. I had one in a loaner box (it was a k6-II 350) and I did not like it much. The few software developers I've known that have had to deal with GPU support say that the card was a huge pain-in-the-butt from a dev point-of-view.

 

[whm1974]

ATI Rage Fury Maxx. My sister was the only person I knew who owned one. I have nothing positive to say about that card. Arguably the worst supported card ever released by either ATI/AMD or Nvidia.

Yeah I remember those. They really bad reviews the card received put me off from buying Ati products.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Everything ATI produced between the X1900 series and the HD 4000 series.

Not so sure about that. Yeah, the 2xxx series was lackluster, but the 3xxx series I remember being pretty popular, particularly the 3850. ATI had fixed most of their driver issues by then, and the 3xxx series really laid the groundwork architecturally for the 4xxx ones.

They certainly weren't as powerful as the nVidia G92 variants, but the price/performance was definitely there.

 

[Batmeat]

Voodoo 5 was actually quite a sweet card.

3DFX and voodoo 4,5,6 set the bar when it came to AA. big cards, but were superior to anything Nvidia had by years when it came to AA. The Geforce 2 just dominated everything else. RIP 3DFX.......brings back bad memories for me. I had a lot of money invested in 3dfx stock.

 

[f2bnp]

Are some of you people seriously fingering the GTX 780, 4850, 2900XT as some of the worst cards in history? I guess most of you got into PC gaming fairly recently, otherwise I just can't see how you would ever consider such cards as some of the worst GPUs of all time.

Lots of candidates for this one. i740 obviously, S3 Virge, Matrox Parhelia, etc.

Kind of obscure now, but the single worst GPU I've ever come across was the 3Dlabs Permedia 2. Creative Labs decided it would be a great idea to sell a gaming graphics card, the modestly named Graphics Blaster Exxtreme, based around a buggy, slow chip that was designed for OpenGL CAD work and wasn't fully compatible with DirectX.

...

People criticise today's GPUs, but at least they work. Back in the 90s that wasn't always true.

I mostly agree with your last sentence, however the Permedia 2 was a pretty decent card, it was never marketed as a gaming card per se. More so, it was a serious OpenGL card, that could actually run some games on the side and was actually decent at that! I have heard of a lot of fun stories of people gaming on their systems at work with such cards or having one at home for work and gaming on the side.

Quirky and somewhat obscure, but certainly not lame. Same goes for the i740. Massively overhyped, but decent card overall. More of a massive disappointment than a bad card honestly.

Focusing on 3D and not 2D because that would take ages, I have a few cards of my own:

-Nvidia's NV1

Triangles just happened to catch on way more than quads. I feel sorry for anyone that bought this card, it had pretty mediocre 2D and audio as well. Terrible support, but at least you could play some Saturn ports on it .

-Alliance AT3D

If this card had come out in 1995 I could maybe excuse it somewhat, but it came out 1997. Performance was terrible and the card lacked a ton of features that were required by games at the time. End result is that IQ is usually horrible, with insane rendering errors and effects missing.

Have a look for yourselves: http://vintage3d.org/at3d.php#sthash.AgE1Ui6K.dpbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysfAAX3zXmM

Be sure to take a look at the galleries from Vintage3D, they are quite a treat!

-Cirrus Logic Laguna3D

Another POS, this time by Cirrus Logic. Lackluster performance and many rendering errors as above. On top of that, the card "featured" texture warping ala Playstation 1 .

http://vintage3d.org/cirrus.php#sthash.8OJVPygK.dpbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbvEhJBzi84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wMkDHuT4WQ

-Number Nine Imagine 128

Again, terrible performance, late to the market, awful drivers and lack of features meaning games looked like crap or did not run at all.

http://vintage3d.org/n9.php#sthash.AYhol5Bk.dpbs

-Trident 3DImage 9850 and 9750

Performance was actually okay with these two, but IQ was terrible.

http://vintage3d.org/trident2.php#sthash.GrmF5eDR.dpbs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFF-P4vQ0to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYGlfYuKz60



All 4 of the cards I mentioned above came out at a time when 3D accelerators were maturing (especially in 1997). In the early years it was somewhat acceptable to experiment and come out with products with questionable longscale support (which is why I'm a bit reluctant to include the NV1). Early adopters were supposed to bite the bullet with these. But, by 1997, with so many great cards out on the market that supported standards such as Direct3D and OpenGL (and Glide for the lucky 3Dfx owners ) it was simply unacceptable to release video cards that pretended to be Direct3D compliant but lacked important features.



-Matrox Parhelia

Total mess of a card. Very expensive and underwhelming, despite some huge hype before it was released. Supposedly DX9 compatible, but it was missing features and never really got proper drivers because of that. Even with latest drivers it can be very buggy and glitchy with certain games.

Honorable mention: S3 Virge

I actually dig the 2D portion of it, but damn this was such a lousy 3D accelerator. Instantly one of the all time worsts, but there are far worse contenders. And hey, at least it displayed everything properly and was supported extensively because it achieved such worldwide spread.

Honorable mention 2: ATi Rage Fury MAXX

Really oddball dual chip card utilizing a couple of Rage 128 Pro chips. The performance was there actually and it came out before the Radeon did and was competitive with the original GeForce. The issue is that driver support only existed for Win9x (the way the chips worked just could not work with Windows 2000 or XP which came out later) and far more importantly, the frametimes were horrible and there was noticable stuttering.
Again, just an oddball card with terrible support.

Honorable mention 3: Nvidia's entire FX 5xxx series

That was pretty bad. I was a sad owner of an FX 5600 XT, a card that performed slower than the FX 5200. The 5700 and 5900 were somewhat decent and would have been better spins, but still weren't enough.
Certainly Nvidia's worst line of cards, but certainly not the worst of all time.

 

[HiroThreading]

1. GeForce FX 5800
Easily. The FX disaster was compounded by NVIDIA cheating on benchmarks by lowering IQ in order to drive up FPS. It's a big reason why many GPU enthusiasts have trust issues when it comes to NVIDIA.

Tied for second place are the:
GeForce 8800 Ultra: Joke pricing.
Radeon HD2900 XT (R600): Hot, loud, broken MSAA and way, way below expectations. At least it was priced competitively though.
GeForce GTX 280: Architecturally sound, but the HD 4870 absolutely wasted this card's value. NVIDIA back peddling on the MSRP and giving people some of their money back was hilarious.
GeForce GTX 480: Similar to the R600 fiasco. Just a very hot, power hungry card for not that much performance. The George Foreman grill-like HSF was probably hot enough to fry eggs and bacon.
Radeon R9 Fury X: It's an insult for AMD to associate the 'Fury' name with such a disappointing product. An overly elaborate liquid cooler system, lacklustre performance and no ability to overclock makes this a dud enthusiast product. Again yeah, maybe just calling it a 'Radeon R9 395X' would have tempered expectations slightly.

Which is interesting since Xenos in Xbox 360 was unified shaders before G80 IIRC. Xenos was a great part for that time - better than the 7900GT derivative in PS3. I wonder if ATI spent so much engineering time on that custom part that it negatively affected 2900xt

There were three primary issues with R600:
1. A very leaky TSMC 80nm process: ATI were gunning for high clocks with the R600, and so they made the decision to go with the then recently announced TSMC 80nm HS process. At the time, the main draw of this process was that it would allow for faster switching transistors, albeit at the expense of some slightly leakier circuitry -- but still well within reason, and much more optimal than pumping more voltage through a process such as its 90nm in order to hit higher clocks. Well, turns out this process turned out to be a disaster, with ATI engineers having to clock R600 at around 742MHz as opposed to the goal of 0.9-1.0 GHz (iirc) in order to keep power consumption within reason. It's little wonder why ATI moved to the 55nm process as fast as they could with the follow up RV670.

2. Broken MSAA resolve: Enabling MSAA on the R600 would cause performance to absolutely tank. The primary reason for this was because the MSAA resolve units in the render back-end (RBE) units were disabled due to issues with fabrication. ATI engineers worked around this by having the stream processors (of which there were plenty of) process AA, but this ended up being more of a bandage, software based solution which hurt the R600 in benchmarks against the G80 and even R580+.

3. Overly generous 512 bit ring bus memory architecture. There was no reason why R600 needed a 512 bit width memory bus, not when GDDR4 was available and could provide ample bandwidth when paired with a 256 bit, conventional cross-bar interface. Some say that GDDR4's higher price relative to GDDR3 would have made this unfeasible, but I'm pretty sure manufacturing a 512 bit bus was more expensive once you factored in the extra silicon costs (bigger bus needs a bigger die and increases power consumption).

 

[IllogicalGlory]

Hmm... Fury X was/is pretty bad, but I think it's closer to "most pointless" rather than "worst". The 980 Ti absolutely killed its sales (with good reason) and its 4GB means it's won't have the longevity it needs, but it still sometimes puts out good performance. It's better than the RX 460 IMO.

Both Fiji and Tonga were a big waste of R&D. Tonga sold okay and the 380X was pretty good, but it didn't replace Tahiti the way it needed to. AMD could have coasted along with the 280/X and been just fine.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

 

[Triloby]

-Nvidia's NV1

Triangles just happened to catch on way more than quads. I feel sorry for anyone that bought this card, it had pretty mediocre 2D and audio as well. Terrible support, but at least you could play some Saturn ports on it .

You mean this NV1 GPU?

 

[StinkyPinky]

In recent history one of the worst cards ever is the r9 290x.... pretty ridicolous...runs hot as hell 95+ degrees, 300W, sounds like a plane taking off...and if that wasnt unfortunate enough it was even slower compared to the competition..

? The 290x was (is?) a good card. Sure the reference cooler it shipped with was a POS, but as soon as the OEM's got their hands on it it turned out quite nicely. Power draw sucks but it's a dedicated gaming video card....

 

[IGemini]

I sidestepped the S3 Virge, but the S3 Savage was pretty bad. It looked good but the performance was miserable.

Mentioning the 4850 and 290X is a bunch of ROFLMAO. Those were solid price/perf choices when they came out.

 

[Avalon]

XGI Volari Duo V8. I believe it came out right around the era of the Radeon 9800pro. Never came anywhere near close to the performance claims, and had so many driver issues it was virtually unusuable.

 

[iwajabitw]

Voodoo 5 was actually quite a sweet card.

Same here, it was awesome for Falcon 4.0, but ended up selling it for a Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 GTS I still have in the attic with a Voodoo 3.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

? The 290x was (is?) a good card. Sure the reference cooler it shipped with was a POS, but as soon as the OEM's got their hands on it it turned out quite nicely. Power draw sucks but it's a dedicated gaming video card....

The power draw is a tad high on Hawaii, but in truth, it's only about 7-10% less efficient than GK110. Furthermore, nearly all aftermarket 290Xs (three out of the four tested by TPU) were about 10% more efficient than the reference card, making it almost completely identical in efficiency to GK110. To be fair, aftermarket 780 Tis displayed similar behavior.

 

[tajoh111]

The two worst cards from an engineering perspective are tied between the 2900xt and the fx 5800.

People can't remember how bad the 2900xt was. It had more transistors than the gtx 8800 but competed only with the 3rd tier of the g80 lineup. It was also made on a more advance process like the fx5800. It also used more power, louder and came 6 months late. It was also hyped to be the second coming. Also it was significantly worse card in professional applications.

The fx5800 was arguably more competitive in performance because it could take the lead in a few benchmarks. The 2900xt couldn't.

The only thing that saved the card was it was repriced because it only competed with the 8800 gts.

The gtx 480 is a great card compared to the the 2900xt and fx5800. Although, it was loud and used more power than its competition, it took the lead by 14% or so in performance which grew to 21% in time over the 5870. And more importantly it killed the 5870 and 6970 in professional applications. Like 100% faster in a fair bit of situation(like half).

http://hothardware.com/reviews/nvid...nd-5000-series-workstation-gpus-review?page=5

The fx5800 and 2900xt were unredeemable. They used more power than the competition and were louder, slower and hotter. The gtx 480 was faster by a significant margin and was a great professional card. Even the 7970 had a hard time competing against it in professional applications.

In recent times, the worst card is Tonga. Tonga was a successor to the 7970. Compare this to the gm204 which was the successor of the gk104, and the difference was enormous. Tonga being a bit bigger than a 7970 had to sell less than the 7970 it was replacing because compared to the gm204, it was dramatically slower. It was a tough sell for it's entire life when it came to profitable margins. Although kepler aged bad, the cards were profitable because the initial performance was good for 2 years.

 

[krumme]

Editing Config.sys and autoexec.bat for the 20 time to make that crappy game to work?
Gfx drivers and games was a mess in the 90ties. The first 3d just made the mess explode.
Even using an owen to get your 8800 to work was a bliss compared to that. And less time consuming.
The worst card have to be the unaccelerated 2d cards. Gaaa. Torture by words. Even installing a cyrix fpu in my mb speed up excel usage and screen rewrite. It was that bad.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I'm surprised people mentioned the VSA 100-based Voodoo5 cards without specifically mentioning the Voodoo5 6000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5#Voodoo_5_6000

Voodoo Volts? Teehee. Also the Kyro II should be mentioned:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/735/18

While it reviewed pretty well, anyone who actually had the Kyro II will remember it as having buggy-arsed drivers and a whole host of other problems. Most folks regretted buying one in the long run, and the Kyro line basically died in its infancy. It was a great card for playing Serious Sam though!

I never had an issue with the kyro II. All games played fine. In all honesty, that was the case until hardware Transform and lightning became a requirement in games. That was the moment the kyro II lost traction because the driver did the T&L on the cpu.

 

[HurleyBird]

Both Fiji and Tonga were a big waste of R&D. Tonga sold okay and the 380X was pretty good, but it didn't replace Tahiti the way it needed to. AMD could have coasted along with the 280/X and been just fine.

Well, Tonga did get them a bunch of Mac sales. But yes, building in a 384-bit bus and never enabling it in a shipping product does strike me as fairly pointless.

 

[HiroThreading]

The two worst cards from an engineering perspective are tied between the 2900xt and the fx 5800.

People can't remember how bad the 2900xt was. It had more transistors than the gtx 8800 but competed only with the 3rd tier of the g80 lineup. It was also made on a more advance process like the fx5800. It also used more power, louder and came 6 months late. It was also hyped to be the second coming. Also it was significantly worse card in professional applications.

The fx5800 was arguably more competitive in performance because it could take the lead in a few benchmarks. The 2900xt couldn't.

The only thing that saved the card was it was repriced because it only competed with the 8800 gts.

The gtx 480 is a great card compared to the the 2900xt and fx5800. Although, it was loud and used more power than its competition, it took the lead by 14% or so in performance which grew to 21% in time over the 5870. And more importantly it killed the 5870 and 6970 in professional applications. Like 100% faster in a fair bit of situation(like half).

http://hothardware.com/reviews/nvid...nd-5000-series-workstation-gpus-review?page=5

The fx5800 and 2900xt were unredeemable. They used more power than the competition and were louder, slower and hotter. The gtx 480 was faster by a significant margin and was a great professional card. Even the 7970 had a hard time competing against it in professional applications.

In recent times, the worst card is Tonga. Tonga was a successor to the 7970. Compare this to the gm204 which was the successor of the gk104, and the difference was enormous. Tonga being a bit bigger than a 7970 had to sell less than the 7970 it was replacing because compared to the gm204, it was dramatically slower. It was a tough sell for it's entire life when it came to profitable margins. Although kepler aged bad, the cards were profitable because the initial performance was good for 2 years.

The issue is that R600, besides the ridiculous 512 bit memory bus, was actually well engineered. As I said before, most of the issues of R600 were due to TSMC's disastrous 80nm process, causing ATI engineers to downclock the card by about 200MHz in order to keep power consumption in check. Oh, and I'll give you the fact that they completely f'd up the MSAA hardware -- even RV670 didn't address that issue iirc.

I'm not sure I have such a rosy memory of Fermi as you do. I think you're mostly referring to the GTX 580? That was very much a decently polished version of Fermi. Power consumption was a lot better, thermals were improved and performance was very good.

Also, Fermi only did well in CUDA apps. In raw compute and dual precision FP, Cypress, Cayman and Tahiti were much better iirc.

And yeah Tonga was just bizarre. It got them the Mac sales due to support for better IQ, but AMD marketing completely botched the 285X launch.