jonbaerEvery GPU That Mattered
Absolute nostalgia fever. About a month ago, I dug up an old desktop in the corner, took the drives out and gave away the machine. It felt like putting a racehorse to pasture: i7-4790k, 1080 Ti. It was my dream machine when I got it. Dual-boot (as we did back in the old days when Proton wasn't here) to Ubuntu, then Elementary, then Arch. By the time I gave it away it wasn't worth the power cost.
And that brought to mind my older dream machine, an 8800 GT from generations past, before which we made do with a Via Unichrome that worked sufficiently enough on the OpenChrome driver that I could edit open software (Freespace only needed a few constants changed) so it would render (though some of the image was smeared and so on I could play!).
I used my 1080 Ti for about eight years. The successor GPU is in some ways way faster (raytracing, AI features etc.), but in others really quite stagnant considering the huge stretch of time that passed between them. ~10 years for 2-3x performance in GPUs at higher nominal and real price points shows how slow silicon advances have been compared to the 90s and 2000s. The same period from 2000 to 2010 would've seen 1000x performance if not more. The difference between a 1080 Ti and a more expensive RTX 50 card is the RTX can render ideally triple the frames in synthetic benchmarks, double the frames in some rasterizing games (most games won't see gains that high), and do a few relatively tame raytracing tricks at performance which is still not really good. At the same throughput it consumes maybe half the power or a bit less. The difference between a GeForce 2 and e.g a Radeon HD 4k is several planes of existence.