These Graphics Cards Shouldn't Have Existed

Here are some of the most pointless GPUs to ever exist.

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[fridaycaliforniaa]

The dual-GPU cards, with two PCBs one on another, were something funny too

[coolL]

I once found an Nvidia GT 630 in a parts bin back in 2012, the same year it came out. Was allowed to just take it, and the danmed thing still lives in a cupboard somewhere, somehow still functional. Back then the lack of graphical horsepower was rather traumatic. But its long since found its use as a backup glorified hdmi / dvi / vga output for various troubleshooting/debugging issues over the years.

[TheIronArmenianakaGIHaigs]

I recall when the R9 295X2 was one of the most powerful cards on the market.
Two GPUs on one PCB and with a built-in water cooler

[Taurui]

I think I regretted buying the Matrox Millennium 2 at the time. It was not cheap, did not support most 3D stuff, and I was hoping that 2D games would run really well on it. They did not.

[dirtydoge]

I had a Sapphire Fury for a while and yeah, that HBM did NOT like ANY sort of tweaking to the clock speeds. I remember adjusting it even ONE mhz would cause the system to freeze.

[PineyJustice]

Fury X was actually an awesome card, it had strengths even against the 980ti and was either super close in performance or beat it in some games. In addition we got the fury nano which was the absolute king of ITX builds. The fury X is pretty much silent even at full load which is pretty incredible.

[johnryan]

I had a Voodoo 5 5500, so the Voodoo 4 4500 wasn't the top card from 3DFX, and the 5500 was a pretty solid card for the time, it performed really well and games that supported glide looked and played better than the same game running on something like a TNT Riva 2 with OpenGL, and it was the first GPU that I'm aware of that had 2 GPU dies on a single board, stuff that Nvidia repeated with later cards like the 295

[jamescavanaugh]

I know it was trash, but I loved my Voodoo5 5500. It was the first GPU I owned that needed an extra power connector (you had to plug a molex into it) and it was actually two GPUs tied together.

[waveformdistortion]

I remember thinking at the time that I would have bought the Titan Z if I won the lottery to use in an ITX system. If I were building a full size system, then like you said I would have bought dual Titan Blacks.

[Dedjkeorrn]

This news script appears to discuss a few graphics cards that were failures in terms of marketing and performance. The first card mentioned is the Nvidia Titan Z, which was released in 2014 and was marketed at gamers but was too expensive and underwhelming in terms of performance. The second card mentioned is the AMD R9 Fury X, which was also released in 2015 and was marketed as a rival to Nvidia's top-tier Titan X but was outperformed by the GTX 980 Ti. The final card discussed is the 3dfx voodoo 4 4500, which was the last graphics card produced by the company and performed poorly compared to its rivals.

[marcfuchs]

I am still daily driving my MSI GTX 1080 for 6 years now, I think this thing was way more than a solid purchase. Even though it's not top of the line anymore, it can run many games in 4K. Not the newest or most demanding ones, but to me it's mainly about productivity anyway.

[benjaminlynch]

AMD has had a few interesting cards in recent years. There was a Radeon Pro card (clearly not aimed at gamers) that had an NVMe interface on it so users could attach an SSD. On their GPU. I think the idea was that the SSD could be used as pseudo-RAM for productivity tasks that used way more than 10-20 GB of actual RAM. But that interface was clearly a bottleneck, and AMD didn’t make that many of these cards.

[besweeeet]

Before I learned about CPU bottlenecks, I bought an HIS 4850 to use with a Athlon 64 3700+ (single core). Helped greatly with the few single-threaded games that I had but did basically nothing for the rest.

[jasonallison]

The Fury X were some of the coolest cards ever made.

[pedrosoares]

I was really sad when my Vega 56 (Sapphire Pulse) died. It had so much oc potential and can run some games in 4K (you'd be surprised how well it scales resolution)

[DTAWOM]

The ATI All-In-Wonder 128 was my biggest video card purchase regret. At launch they promised eventual driver support for OpenGL. I believe they did finally add it years later but by then there were much better graphic chip options.

[robertoclaux]

I bought a second HD 7950 for crossfire use back in the day. I quickly discovered that few games actually benefitted from it (with many games actually becoming unstable while trying to use it)— and having two gpus turned my PC into an oven, and a rocket engine, at the same time.

[davidbronke]

"To top it off, performance was... Underwhelming."
*video pauses for buffering*

[Cichfishy]

The 6990 was also a very effective room heater with deafening dB's.

[captante]

I snagged a GTX-480 really cheap @ Newegg right after the 580 was released.... performance roughly matched my other GPU a GTX-570 but it was a lot louder.

When the Kepler cards arrived I traded the 480 in for a GTX-680 using EVGA's "Step-Up" program.