Inefficient GPU's VS performance

[Mush Brain]

seems to me that in the past, most GPU's that hit high temperatures and use a high amount of power,usually end up being ultimate badass GPU's for gaming.

 

Let us recap.

 

Radeon 4870/90 were hot and loud cards.

GTX 480 was a power hog that used a direct touch heatpipe design,of which got pwnd by the vapor chamber design later released on the 570/580.

6990 absolute horrid card,was MEGA loud and well.. drivers did not help at all, but it did have 6970 GPU's.

 

 

Now my last really power hungry/hot card was the GTX 480 (under stock cooling, obviously modded it.

 

The R9 series i don't really class as hot/loud as they have AIB's that have appropriately tamed them.

 

The GTX 480 i will use for my example as it lsted me 4 years solid and seemed to always out perform higher costing GPU's with overclocking.

 

When the 480 was released, i remember it being 1FPS behindthe Radeon 5870 1GB, at around 29FPS.

 

Here it is in 2013 under custom cooling with an OC.

 

 

Same story for BF3, the 480 at ULTRA was barely going above 40-50FPS.

 

Here it is later doing 55+FPS

 

 

 

Recently AMD have taken advantage of their architecture and spread it across multiple gens, 7K-R9 series.

 

Feel free too add more and discuss this.

 

 

[Doughnutnator]

I think that's just mature drivers. It's very common that with time they optimize drivers and you can get a little bit more performance.

[Humbug]

Can't believe that those Crysis 1 graphics are from 7 years ago. Doesn't look that much different to new games.

[vlkn´]

miss my ol´ gtx 480 #roomtemperature30°C+inwinter

Beta drivers destroyed it got stuck at desktop while switching to the evil game minecraft.

#RIP GTX480, 2013 august 21st @03:32:03AM

[Briggsy]

I remember my 8800 GTX being hot as hell until I put an Arctic Accelero Xtreme tri-fan cooler on it. I look at that cooler now, and realize just how far ahead Arctic were back then. The Nvidia G80 chip was historical and a power hog, but ultimately got killed by Crysis.