Gadgetory

now as most of you probably know Nvidia acquired our company back in early q2 of 2016 so you can imagine how upset our emerald overlords were when we decided to test 10 years worth of AMD video cards before giving the green team the same treatment well we finally put out the fire in our server room and just in time to bring you the other side of the GPU performance coin welcome to Nvidia video cards through the ages Rockets sq+ Force FX features pressure-sensitive qwe a si D keys which can be configured in three different modes for multiple functions check it out now at the link below there's going to be a long video so let's get right into it we used a 59 60 X test bench with 64 gigs of DDR 4 RAM to isolate the performance of the graphics cards and we used the same benchmarks as AMD GPUs through the ages for consistency first up is in videos ancient flagship the 8800 GTX this card was freaking revolutionary it brought us an all-new architecture called Tesla in the biggest chip we had ever seen in a GPU codename g80 it was built on the same 90 nanometer processed node as its predecessor G 71 but was over twice as big with almost two and a half times as many transistors devoted to gaming performance enabling new DirectX 10 features like SM 4.0 and a reduction in API overhead CUDA which is still very much in use today and enabled developer to run general-purpose code on the graphics chip and the ability to run three cards at once in SLI which isn't to say that it's standalone performance wasn't impressive in its own right G 80 with its 768 Meg's of gddr3 RAM on a wide 384 bit bus smacked around even to of invidious previous flagships in SLI and all of that for a measly hundred dollars more which almost makes me feel better about the cash-grab 8800 altra that they released six months later for two hundred and thirty more dollars that was basically the same thing with a fancy plastic shroud on it the GeForce 8800 GT wasn't strictly speaking a new flagship but rather a weird Tesla architecture refresh it was the first built by Nvidia on SMC's shiny new 65 nanometer process this node shrink allowed nvidia to drop power consumption by 60 watts reduce the die size and actually bump up the transistor count at the same time a modest increase that you guessed it no actually you probably didn't the 8800 GT was on par or slower than its predecessor almost across the board due to its narrower memory bus and 16 fewer shader units where people got excited was the price 8800 GT was less than half the price of 8800 GTX it was single slot enabling em ATX users to run to an SLI with additional expansion cards and it also featured an on-chip display engine finally it was the first consumer GPU with a PCI Express 2.0 interface which still to this day is barely saturated by flagship graphics cards the last flagship silicon before Nvidia transitioned to the GTX insert three numbers and maybe a couple letters here nomenclature was G 92 the beating heart of the 9800 gtx+ ask you that low burden videos cost and bumped up performance over the architectural e identical 9800 GTX by shrinking from 65 to 55 nanometers and boosting up the clock speed now we get to the GTX 280 yes we know it actually came out before that last one I was talking about but deal with it so forget everything we said earlier about 55 nanometer the 280 built on the mature 65 nanometer process had a massive 576 square millimeter die with 1.4 billion transistors and to put that insanity in context AMD's closest competitor the 4870 had a measly 959 million and further driving up complexity it shipped with a minimum of one gigabyte of ethics memory on a huge 512 bit bus something nvidia hasn't done before or since on a consumer card the good news is that it absolutely crushed their previous generation efforts even delivering ample performance for stereoscopic 3d gaming a big push for Nvidia at that time we'll skip over the 300 series because all of these were just crappy rebrands for notebooks and Best Buy pcs meaning that the next real GPU in line is the GTX 480 based on the then all new and now infamous Fermi architecture this was in videos first swing at DirectX 11 support which is still widely used today and this is becoming a bit of a common theme but while the new 40 nanometer process allowed it to be smaller than the GTX 280 it was still huge with a 529 square millimeter die a whomping 3 billion transistors and support for DDD are 5 memory which again is still widely used today interesting fact Nvidia apparently thought it performed so well not just in gaming but also in compute which was a big focus for Fermi that the largest configuration of GF 100 silicon never actually made its way into a shipping product or maybe that was due to power constraints cuz uh yeah even with the theoretical efficiency advantage of a smaller node the 480 was such a barbecue that Nvidia provided a convenient Grill on the face of the card to cook your eggs our next contestant is the GTX 580 and it featured an optimized and fully enabled Fermi dubbed GF 110 we've got most of the usual improvements here more vram higher clock speeds and a slightly smaller die but nothing as exciting as video card cooking which we mean in a good way 580 performed noticeably better than 480 while also managing lower temperatures noise power consumption it was kind of like the GTX 480 s if that makes sense to the Apple fans out there in a seventh corner of our showdown this must be a weird-looking ring we have the GTX 680 ah yes goodbye Fermi hello Kepler a lot of things changed here for K 60 Hertz output was enabled via DisplayPort 1.2 PCI Express 3.0 burst onto the scene with double the bandwidth of version 2 the die size shrunk way down to 294 square millimeters and the gddr5 got kicked up a notch to 6 gigahertz thanks to a newly redesigned memory controller finally we got it wait a minute we dropped down to a 256 bit bus hold on a sec look at that codename NVIDIA top tier chips usually end in a zero well what they did was they used AMD's complacency and a new 28 nanometer process along with some dynamic power tricks called GPU boost to crank up performance so much that they gave us a step-down chip as a replacement for a top-tier one to save a buck and still managed to make it look like an upgrade not that they passed any of those savings to the consumer it was priced at $500 same as the GTX 580 though I guess at least we got Hardware h.264 encoding for game stream and shadowplay g-sync variable refresh rate technology and support for the Vulcan API now the next logical stop in our journey might seem like gtx 780 but in February 2013 Nvidia kicked convention and logic in the head with a Titan card based on the chip that might have been GTX 680 in a parallel universe where AMD had been keeping up but instead it turned into 780 and then 780ti so we're going to go with that since it was kind of the final form of the gk110 now not much changed product or feature wise here big Kepler was a much bigger much badder 680 with a 90 percent bigger die more than double the transistors at a whopping 7 billion and a $6.99 price tag to go with it ouch at least though this amounted to a sizeable bump in performance over last generations 680 in basically every application in another unconventional move Nvidia completely skipped over 800 series and went straight to 900 so even though the 980 and the 980 TI were 9 months apart we're going to bunch them together because apparently that's what everybody's doing so the 900 series was actually based on the same 28 nanometer process as Kepler shrinking silicon got a lot harder in the early 2010's but two years later we were due for some kind of performance improvement so Nvidia's engineers brought us maxwell these GPUs feature an integrated arm CPU which according to Nvidia provides more independence from a given system's primary CPU the 980 again a step-down chip in big kid clothes performs a little better than the kepler GTX 780 Ti which is an impressive feat but the big story is efficiency it boasts an 85 watt lower TDP the 980ti was a bit of a different story though it rocked eight billion transistors an unheard-of 601 square millimeter die Nvidia is biggest ever six gigs of VRAM and all the API support you could ever want except maybe DirectX 12 depending on who you ask while Maxwell was marketed as fully DirectX 12 capable the developer of ashes of the singularity oxide games found that maxwell cards performed very poor early with a sink compute enabled it's kind of a big deal so all of this amounted to an astonishing performance improvement considering the lack of processed node change and hdmi 2.0 support was a nice touch finally we arrived at the modern day the gtx 1080 and 1080 TI based on the pascal architecture 10 series GPUs have brought a lot to the table including gddr5 X at the top end which increased memory speeds to up to 10 gigahertz multiple DisplayPort 1.4 ports for 8k and high refresh 4k monitor support high bandwidth SLI bridges not to mention the elimination of three-way and four-way SLI for gaming and the smallest manufacturing node yet 16 nanometer 1080 launched in May of 2016 with 7.2 billion transistors and this is becoming a pattern now a small performance improvement over the 980 TI then 1080 TI followed with a much more substantial bump one of the biggest stories here though was really compute Pascal was designed to be a compute powerhouse with the top-tier GP 100 chip going actually unused in gaming products so 1080 Ti and it's Titan analog were instead based on GP 102 anew in between tier the ingenious EWS 360 ap is an enterprise class dual band access point that's ideal for large offices schools and hospitality guest Wi-Fi access it features AC speeds with business class features and operates an autonomous or managed modes it's got a three by three antenna design and a high-powered radio and comes with a free management software called easy master you can manage anywhere from one access point to thousands and there are no per device license fees so that means no annual subscription which is great for keeping the total cost of ownership down check it and other ingenious products out over at their website through the link in the video description thanks for watching nvidia gpus through the ages if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we've featured in the video description also linked down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join