Every PC, since the IBM 5150 has had a graphics card inside it and we have seen many models and brands that have stood out for better or for worse throughout the ages. This time we bring you a list of what we believe are the best low-end graphics cards in history, which despite their modest specifications and low price have given performance well above their range.
If we do a review of the graphics cards that have stood out the most in the market, then the most likely thing is that we end up remembering the high-end GPUs, since these are the flagship models. But not everyone has access to them and for many people it is the much more modest cards that have marked them.
That is why we have decided to make a list with the most flagship low-end graphics cards, those that despite their price and lower technical specifications than their younger sisters have ended up offering an enormous quality / price.
Criteria for selecting the best low-end graphics
The main criterion we have followed is not that of performance but the relationship between quality and price on the one hand and on the other what they have contributed to their users.
That is why you are going to find graphics cards that would not be considered low-end in terms of performance but we have included them due to the fact that they came at a much lower price than what would correspond to their performance. That is, we have not focused
Once the clarification is made, below you have a list of what we consider the best low-end graphics cards in history.
3DFX Voodoo 3 1000, 3D acceleration for everyone
3Dfx Voodoos were the byword for gaming in the late 90s, all thanks to their excellent performance and the fact that their proprietary graphics API, Glide, was more advanced than the rest.
A series of bad decisions and resting on their laurels led to bankruptcy and its purchase by its rival, NVIDIA, but anyone who wanted to play games on PC usually bought a Voodoo.
The Voodoo 3 1000 was a shortened version of the 2000 model, which made use of a slightly slower SGRAM memory and a clock speed of only 125 MHz. All this allowed it to be sold without a heatsink, reducing costs and granting 3D acceleration of quality to the most vulgar of mortals.
NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX, the first low-end GPU
At the end of 1999, NVIDIA released the first complete GPU for PC under the name GeForce, for the first time the graphics process was carried out by the graphics card and the calculation of the geometry of the scene no longer depended on the power of the CPU.
Just a few months after the launch of the first GeForces, NVIDIA brought us the second generation but also a low-end GeForce called GeForce 2 MX, which were hugely popular.
As a curiosity, the motherboards for NVIDIA’s AMD K7 CPUs, known as NForce, had a GeForce 2 MX built into them.
GeForce 9500 GT, a highly popular low-end graphics
NVIDIA’s G80 architecture brought us the legendary GeForce 8800, the first GPU with unified shaders on PCs and the first for DirectX 10. Which was accompanied by its low-end version, the GeForce 8600, which was sold in the range of € 150-170. The GeForce 9500 on the other hand, is a version under a more advanced node of the GeForce 8600, which allowed NVIDIA to place this card at a suggested price of € 100.
ATI Radeon HD 4770, the best low-end DirectX 10 graphics
For the jump to 40nm, AMD took its second generation of GPUs under the Terascale architecture and adopted it to the 40nm node. The result? One of the best graphics cards in history that could be bought for around € 100 and with an excellent performance-price ratio.
When the best NVIDIA card for a similar price was released was the GeForce 9800 GT, and AMD’s HD 4770 performed 56% better. Which made it the best DirectX 10 card by far in the low end.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti, the best low-end graphics in 2014
NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture dominated the market before the Pascal, GTX 1000 series, through the GTX 800 range in GTX 900 desktop notebooks. But the first graphics card to use this NVIDIA architecture was the GeForce GTX 750 Ti.
This GPU that originally sold for € 150 was the basis for the GeForce 860M and 960M for laptops, an excellent card that many, including the writer of this article, were able to access and continue to have access to to be able to play a large number of games of the past decade.
Best current low-end graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5500 4GB
Based on the Navi 14 GPU with RDNA architecture, this 4 GB card was launched at a price of approximately 170 euros and has an excellent quality / price ratio to play games at 1080p with graphics in between.
We have selected it for being much better than the GTX 1650 with which it competes in price and for being for the moment the best graphics card in value for money of the low range.
Unfortunately the low-end cards are disappearing due to the fact that the cards integrated in the CPUs have been replacing them and what is in the sector below € 100 is not worth looking at even, especially if you have your CPU has a good integrated graphics card.
The end of low-end graphics cards
The vast majority of CPUs actually today are SoCs, because they are heterogeneous units that not only include the CPU but also the GPU or graphics processor.
This has led to the fact that the lowest range of all is disappearing and that what we would consider a low-end graphics has completely changed, which in turn is an irony if we take into account that the inclusion of the GPU in the processor promised material democratization of GPUs, that is, everyone would have a low-end GPU good enough to play games.
Not everyone needs a GPU for gaming, but not everyone who plays needs to spend more than € 200 on a graphics, hopefully the price of the low-end does not increase. And although we have cases like the NVIDIA GT 1030 or the GT 710 GPUs, their performance is exceeded in most cases by the integrated graphics.