The GPU Nvidia would rather forget – GeForce FX

[revenant]

Thank you, I didn’t know this history

ikr? I never knew that either. I rode a 9700 Pro out for a long ass while skipping over the whole FX era and then went straight to a 6800GT. I did watch from the sidelines and it seemed like people were pretty underwhelmed by the FX cards for the most part.. well until the final couple skews..

EDIT: Dan_D and WilyKit - Yeah the 1900xt's (I think one is an xtx) were nice.. I still have a pair of those which I ran in CF back in the day.. loud as hell but they were beautiful cards for the day.. They still look pretty bad ass too.

 

[arthur_tuxedo]

The FX series was perhaps the last time that NVIDIA just completely fell flat on their face with no backup plan. Even the previous GeForce 4 Ti4600 looked pretty competitive for the money against the FX series, to say nothing of ATI’s dominant 9x00 series. Any other NVIDIA failures since then have been short-lived or happened during AMD’s long mailaise era so they went unpunished. The embarassment of the FX 5800 Ultra probably led to the all-out dominance of the 8800 GTX, so we should probably be thankful.

The last few times we got a powerhouse card from NVIDIA, it was when they were worried about stiff competition. The 8800 GTX was designed to defeat the mythical Radeon HD 2x00 series (not the actual one, which was a disappointment), the 1080 Ti was supposed to topple mythical Vega (but only had to contend with actual Vega), and the 4090 was meant to go up against what the 7900 XTX was supposed to be. AMD doesn’t need to actually bring the fight for consumers to win, but NVIDIA needs to think they will.