Yeah the NV1 even was weak, barely made a dent in the market, NV2 cancelled it's lucky they survived to the Riva128. Then the top end 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000 series models all had a fall off the PCB and die mode, which they continued in the 285, 295 I think.

List articles like this are solely designed for clicks and have to be trendy.

Hence the inclusion of only modern-ish GPUs. Older GPUs won't get the same of search engine results, nor be as likely to spark some online flame war.

1. FX5800 / FX5200 (tie, inefficient loud card and slow bottom barrel card, avoided the number 5 in favor of homaging who they ate, launched with the terrible slogan, and caught driver cheating)
2. GF4MX (Set shaders back a couple years)
3. EVGA GTX1080 (burning down the house)
4. NV1 (a wet fart only fondly remembered for WOW SATURN GAME QUADS RULE)
5. Vanta (a TNT for assholes)

leileilol wrote on 2022-11-29, 05:28:

5. Vanta (a TNT for assholes)

It's an M64 but somehow worse! 😁 Most of these Vanta cards were cheaply made and had poor image quality due to low-end components used. The reduced clocks and lower memory amount compared to the M64 didn't exactly help either.

At least the Vanta and the M64 were easily distinguishable from the full TNT2. Unlike some other cards with a 64-bit memory bus which used the same name as their 128-bit versions. I'm looking at you MX440 and FX5200!

To be honest, I considered the NV1 and disqualified it from my list because it was 1995 - there really weren't many standards of anything 3D back then besides I guess OpenGL, so quads probably weren't really an invalid choice for a home game fastening machine. I'm sure there are other reasons for it to be a bad card, but quads are IMO not one.

I think the 8600GT deserves to be on that list more than the newer cards. The 8600GT was underwhelming, often being slower than the 7600GT it replaced, whilst not really being fast enough to use its DX10 features. It also had the general 8 series problem that I can't even remember what it is anymore.

leileilol wrote on 2022-11-29, 05:28:

1. FX5800 / FX5200 (tie, inefficient loud card and slow bottom barrel card, avoided the number 5 in favor of homaging who they a […]
Show full quote

1. FX5800 / FX5200 (tie, inefficient loud card and slow bottom barrel card, avoided the number 5 in favor of homaging who they ate, launched with the terrible slogan, and caught driver cheating)
2. GF4MX (Set shaders back a couple years)
3. EVGA GTX1080 (burning down the house)
4. NV1 (a wet fart only fondly remembered for WOW SATURN GAME QUADS RULE)
5. Vanta (a TNT for assholes)

How about a FX5200 with a 64bit bus ?> I think it might actually tie with the Vanta.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2022-11-29, 07:44:

I think the 8600GT deserves to be on that list more than the newer cards. The 8600GT was underwhelming, often being slower than the 7600GT it replaced, whilst not really being fast enough to use its DX10 features. It also had the general 8 series problem that I can't even remember what it is anymore.

Overheating destroying the BGA solder balls over time, this actually affected a great many MACs too that used 8000 series GPUs.

Becasue nobody gives a damn about ancient cards like the FX-series ot TNT2s, it was obvious from the article. It's just clickbait about MODERN cards, not dinosaurs.

That list is more like a clickbait, except perhaps the GTX 480 due to thermal and power consumption issues at the time. The GTX 970 wasn't a bad card despite controversy around the memory configuration as the real-world benchmarks weren't affected.

Regarding the GeForce 8 series, anything below the 8800 where underwhelming compared to their predecessor and contrary to the popular belief, the whole thing with bumpgate didn't only affect nVidia products of that era (see Xbox 360 RROD and stuff about reflowing ATi/AMD Radeon cards).

That list was made for clicks, obviously. And of course it won't mention GeForce 4 MX. Who cares about something that old? Therefore only fresh cards or something very memeable like GTX 480 (GrillForce). Something your average gamer Joe could relate to. Srsly, even AMD memed on GTX 480.

Joseph_Joestar wrote:

Most of these Vanta cards were cheaply made and had poor image quality due to low-end components used.

Not Vanta problem per se. That applies to every card targeted for low-end with no set standard of quality.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

It also had the general 8 series problem that I can't even remember what it is anymore.

Every single GeForce 8 card is prone to sudden death.

Gmlb256 wrote:

the whole thing with bumpgate didn't only affect nVidia products of that era

Some say it affected Nvidia chips since 90nm lithography, i.e. ALL Nforce chipsets on that node and all die-shrink GeForce 7 cards. Latter certainly had a tendency to die suddenly. Problem is not as apparent in Radeon X1xxx series, which were made on the same TSMC 90nm node. Xbox 360 was just poorly designed, so any chip will die in such conditions.

dude doesn't look old enough to remember but if we made a list of absolute dog garbage Nvidia GPU's it would be

NV1
MX200
MX420/MX440SE/MX4000
FX5200
FX5800

candle_86 wrote on 2022-11-30, 05:31:

dude doesn't look old enough to remember but if we made a list of absolute dog garbage Nvidia GPU's it would be […]
Show full quote

dude doesn't look old enough to remember but if we made a list of absolute dog garbage Nvidia GPU's it would be

NV1
MX200
MX420/MX440SE/MX4000
FX5200
FX5800

I have a 128bit version of the MX4000, its a perfectly serviceable GPU and for all intents and purposes is a MX440-8X.

I do agree the 64bit version is garbage much like the FX5200 64bit version is garbage.

Obviously missing from this list is the 8300 GS, G100, and G205 group of lightly accelerated framebuffers.

Ugh! I saw this article too the other day and I *knew* I shouldn't click on it, because Digital Trends is completely worthless... but I clicked anyway out of morbid curiosity.

What a lame list.

1. The 480 wasn't very well received, that's for sure... and it ran way too hot. I had a 470 and was happy to replace it with a 560 Ti as soon as I could because of the temps and noise, but it was still a pretty powerful card. And heck, nvidia even updated the 4xx series to support DX12 a full seven years after release. Sure, it wasn't great, but that's pretty awesome support. This is probably the weakest card on THEIR list though, for sure.

2. The GTX 970 was a fantastic graphics card and is still useful today for many many people. It was also available at a fantastic price fairly early on. All the "3.5GB" thing did for me was put ~$30 back in my pocket when I was still very happy using the card for several more years. A friend of mine now has it and he's very happy to play older\lighter games with no issues what so ever.

3. 1060 3GB? It was not a great card and it suffered from poor naming... but it filled a small gap in their lineup, even if the specs were gimped.

4...5... 2080 and 3080... blah... what are we even talking about here? It's like they just watched a couple of angst filled tech-tuber videos about recent video cards and then put these on the list because they had the most screaming\crying in them.

No mention of:
The groundbreaking... and yet almost entirely useless and forgotten (other than at Vogons) NV1

The Geforce 4MX series (not bad cards but should NOT have been called Geforce 4 and likely set back the adoption of pixel shaders in games significantly)

The FX series (specifically the 5600 and 5800 Ultra... not much to say here...)

Geforce 6200TC "Turbo Cache" cards with *32bit* memory interfaces... (yeah... turbo, mhmm)

The 7950GX2 (hot, noisy, SLI turd sammich which was very often slower than the 7900 GTX and was made irrelevant by the infinitely better 8800 GTX only *5 months later* )

Honorable mention: anything suffering from their bad solder issues, especially motherboard chipsets with IGPs like the 6150SE or laptops\AIOs with 8400GS or 8400GT.

*panting*

... okay, sorry... had a bit of PTSD there I think.

Anyway, yes a lot of their newer stuff has been priced very high and hasn't come down, but to suggest that any of their recent cards are among the worst they've put out is absurd. If they were putting out garbage their cards wouldn't hold their value so well in comparison to AMD's.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-11-30, 08:00:

2. The GTX 970 was a fantastic graphics card and is still useful today for many many people. It was also available at a fantastic price fairly early on. All the "3.5GB" thing did for me was put ~$30 back in my pocket when I was still very happy using the card for several more years. A friend of mine now has it and he's very happy to play older\lighter games with no issues what so ever.

Right, great card and I don't remember hearing about a single actual use case where the 3.5GB fast ram + 0.5GB slow ram would have been ruinous because the drivers handled it so well. Only some artificially created scenarios caused stuttery mess as far as I know.

But the problem with it was NVIDIA itself, specifically their marketing that instead of being open about it they really wanted to hide the whole 3.5+0.5 thing. Every time someone mentions GTX 970 the first thing that pops in to my mind is the passive aggressive press release where NVIDIA pretty much stated that it hasn't done anything wrong, it has never anything wrong, it has always done everything to the benefit of their customers and if they somehow have done something wrong, which they don't admit doing, they've only done it because someone/something else forced them to do so. Sounded a lot like what the statements from a certain goverment always sound like.

But that's how it often goes, engineers doing good job while marketing people do moronic marketing things.

To be fair I think the NV1 gets a lot of flak that isn't warranted. You have to consider it was 1995, before any standards were set and there we almost no competition in the marked. They bet on Saturn's quad technology, but that didn't take of. When the industry then settled on polygons and DirectX, the NV1 was hopeless.

But in 1995, if you had to choose between the 3D accelerators on the marked (3D Blaster VLB, Paradise Tasmania 3D and the card sold with 3D capabilities, but almost none in practice Matrox Millennium), the NV1 was the best buy of them. The SEGA games were impressive on a Pentium 90/100.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-11-30, 07:25:

Obviously missing from this list is the 8300 GS, G100, and G205 group of lightly accelerated framebuffers.

they aren't bad, they weren't intended to play games, merely to accelerate Video which they did.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-11-29, 09:33:

Overheating destroying the BGA solder balls over time, this actually affected a great many MACs too that used 8000 series GPUs.

IMO this is by far the worst nVidia episode. Geforce 6600 was also affected, as well as those Geforce 7300-something mobiles in laptops. They just died after around two years, depending on how hot they ran in general use. You could put them in the oven, then maybe use them for a few months again.
After all that, I switched to Intel and ATI/AMD graphics for years.