This is a wonderful-looking infographic, but I truly don't think there are 49 GPUs that mattered in the PC gaming hardware space - let alone all of computer graphics. Call it recency bias, but after the Pascal cards it feels like maybe one or two more entrants actually mattered?
With the release of D3D9 in 2002, GPUs of different vendors didn't really stand out anymore since they all implemented the same feature set anyway (and that's a good thing).
IMO there’s room for something more recent, maybe a Titan or something, to stand in as an avatar for making GPUs as compute accelerators a thing. I know that’s been going on forever, but at some point it went from some niche hacky thing to a primary use-case for the cards.
But yeah this list has a on of incremental bumps on it. Maybe there was some mixing of cards that mattered historically and cards that mattered to the author.
Nvidia Turing (RTX 20) definitely marked a major shift IMO.
- It was the first card to enable real-time ray-traced effects.
- Mesh shaders are a significant overhaul of the geometry pipeline that's only recently getting real traction.
- Its tensor cores enabled a new generation of AI-driven upscaling/antialiasing. DLSS 2, FSR 4 and XeSS are all some variation of "TAA + neural networks", and these all rely on specialized matrix hardware to get optimal performance.
Obviously all of these features are supported across all vendors. Intel Arc Alchemist has all of these features as well, and AMD got RT and mesh shader support with RDNA2 along with slowly building up to tensor cores with RDNA3/4. But Turing clearly debuted these feature which have majorly changed the landscape of realtime 3D graphics.
