November 2006 - We are taking big steps now as we really have to wrap this up. The card that probably is rated my personal number 1 card of all time, the GeForce 8800 GTX with 768MB of memory priced at $599 USD (!). People today are still using this card and it still packs punch and the timeline where we enter the DX10 unified shader pipeline. Well, everybody remembers this one I guess. It's an icon really.

Now I'm skipping the rest of the series 9 cards, as these where merely refreshes of the series 8 cards.

Last year in 2008 NVIDIA released their fairly spectacular GeForce GTX 280/285. The first ever GPU with 1.4 billion transistors and nearly a teraflop of performance. An amazing GPU in both performance ... and physical size.

I'm closing however with ATI, their latest and greatest is the Radeon HD 4890. AMD's ATI Series 3000 cards were good. AMD and ATI always remarkably fight back with a kickass product series. Ever since ATI launched their series 4000 cards, they are moving mountains, and good for them as we need that in this technology sector. Even after this product was released merely weeks ago, we see improvements already... expect AIB/AIC cards soon running at a 1 GHz core.

So there you have it. A quick trip in the memory lane of GPUs. Please bear in mind that now even half the cards released in the timeframe have been showed. There are just so many. Also due to the lack of availability I could not include any Matrox cards for example and I just wish I could find the Radeon 9700, which redefined graphics performance.

Final words

We are now in 2009, currently the graphics industry in in a slope fighting off the bad economy. The one piece of advise we like to give the graphics industry is to remain creative. Keep introducing new products, do not delay them. Cutting edge technology is what it is all about. NVIDIA for example is fighting off a bad economy, yet also the fact that they have been refreshing their product ever since the GeForce 8 series. We need new technology; DirectX 11 is going to be the next big thing in the industry. From it will derive new graphics hardware and from there onwards, things (we expect) will pick up again as DX11 is really exciting.

This is Guru3D, we are right down in the middle of technology. Within that complex world of continuously evolving and difficult to understand technology, we will show you what the chipset designers and manufacturers have to offer back in the days, now and in the future. We'll show you the good, the bad... but most importantly, we are here to translate that complex matters in more logical terminology, fair and objective.

Onwards to the next ten years, try to imaging where we'll be with technology on 2019. We are Guru3D, and we are ten years old... and you are invited to join us for the ride. Next week we'll be reporting from Computex, and showing the latest and greatest technology of course. Thank you all for your continued support and we hope you did like this small peek in the history of graphics cards. This week we'll have more contests and a 'green' article lined up, check back each day.

Last but not least, we thank you as a reader, but of course also all staff involved in making Guru3D.com happen, you guys (and one girl) know who you are, thank you all.

• Click here to go back to the A decade of Guru3D landing page.
• Click here to read part #1 of the History of Guru3D.