Artifact
Ten Years of Graphics Cards
Six cards. One decade. The story of how computing power went from the size of a shoebox to the palm of your hand.
From first card to last — 2003 to 2018
56×
more transistors
16×
more memory
90×
more compute
The big picture →
How your phone compares to all eight cards combined
The cards
2003
NVIDIA
GeForce FX 5600
63M transistors · 256MB DDR · AGP · ~25 GFLOPS
Act I — The DirectX 9 Wars
2004
ATI
Radeon 9550
75M transistors · 256MB DDR · AGP · ~20 GFLOPS
Act I — The DirectX 9 Wars
2006
NVIDIA
GeForce 7800 GS
302M transistors · 256MB GDDR3 · AGP · ~96 GFLOPS
Act II — AGP's Last Stand
2007
AMD / ATI
Radeon HD 2900 XT
700M transistors · 512MB GDDR4 · PCIe · 215W · ~475 GFLOPS
Act III — A New Slot, A New War
2009
AMD
Radeon HD 5750
1.04B transistors · 1GB GDDR5 · PCIe · ~900 GFLOPS
Act IV — The New World
2013
NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 760 FTW
3.54B transistors · 4GB GDDR5 · PCIe 3.0 · 2.26 TFLOPS
Act V — The Compute Era
2017
NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
12B transistors · 11GB GDDR5X · PCIe 3.0 · 11.3 TFLOPS
Act VI — Pascal's Peak
2018
NVIDIA
GeForce RTX 2080
13.6B transistors · 8GB GDDR6 · PCIe 3.0 · 72 RT Cores · 10.07 TFLOPS
Act VII — Light Learns to Bounce