Understand the evolution of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards in the past decade through visual charts

The performance comparison of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards should be one of the favorite topics of discussion among DIY players, and it is easy to become the focus of discussion. If there is a relatively obvious gap between the two sides in the same generation of products, it may be easier to draw a conclusion about who is strong and who is weak. If the difference is not big, or different conclusions will be drawn from different dimensions, then some players will be blushing online for this, and I believe they will all have encountered this situation.

Recently, a Reddit user selected the data of the representative graphics cards of Nvidia and AMD in the past ten years, and made a visual chart, allowing us to intuitively see the evolution of the GPUs of the two sides from different angles. By selecting representative products of each generation for comparison, you can also find out where there will be significant changes. If you combine the sales and market share data, you can understand what kind of impact will be reflected in the market.

From the above chart, we can see that with the Pascal architecture as the dividing line, the performance of the two parties was equal before that, but then NVIDIA widened the gap, and AMD did not catch up until the RDNA 2 architecture. It should be said that AMD’s performance improvement before the RDNA 2 architecture is step by step, but NVIDIA started with the Pascal architecture and the performance has increased significantly.

In recent years, AMD has been more radical in process selection than NVIDIA, and at the same time, it has a cost advantage most of the time. In the 40nm era, AMD’s power consumption control is superior to Nvidia, and the opposite is true after entering the 28nm era. Until the RDNA architecture appears, the RDNA 2 architecture can even exceed the energy consumption ratio. In addition, under the same number of transistors and the same frequency, the performance and efficiency of both parties have been decreasing. To a certain extent, this is due to the addition of new technologies such as optical tracking.