Zero1 Awards Special: Best graphics cards of the past decade

In this special Zero1 Awards nostalgia series, we shine the spotlight on desktop GPUs that have set the bar in performance, innovation, and gaming excellence in recent years. From rendering breathtaking landscapes to powering intense gaming sessions, these GPUs have defined a decade of digital motion graphics. 

Also read: Zero1 Awards Special: Best smartphones of the past decade

Dive into the legacy of these trailblazing graphics cards and how they’ve shaped the world of gaming and graphics. Here are the Zero1 Award winning GPUs of the past decade…

Zero1 Winner 2013: NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti

The GTX 780 Ti retook the crown of the fastest GPU with at least 5% increment in performance over the Titan with certain benchmarks pulling about 15% increment, which was considerable at the time. 

Functionally, it had 16 texture units and 192 stream processors more than the Titan. What was even better was that the GTX 780 Ti was cheaper than the Titan which made it the right choice if you were a stickler for NVIDIA products for all your gaming needs over a decade ago.

Zero1 Winner 2014: AMD R9 295X2

It was no wonder that a dual GPU graphics card was going to win the Zero1 crown. So it was down to the AMD R9 295X2 and the NVIDIA TITAN Z. The R9 295X2 was a really long card and came with an integrated liquid cooling setup – something that the competition didn’t have for bragging rights. Cooling aside, the GPU’s performance was way off the charts. 

Also read: Zero1 Awards Special: Best gaming laptops of the past decade

Including the R9 295X2 in our usual charts would be highly unfair since all their metrics get scaled down by a ridiculous factor. So we compared it to the TITAN Z, which was the only card that can even came close to competing with the AMD R9 295X2 – which won in every benchmark except one. The surprising part is that the card was priced much less than the TITAN Z despite being the better performer. A worthy Zero1 Award winner, through and through!

Zero1 Winner 2015: NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X 

Coming from a family of goliaths, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X was yet another ace performer with a massive 12 GB of RAM to boast. Pushing the boundaries of performance each year, NVIDIA’s TITAN sure did live up to expectations back in 2015. Its massive RAM cluster was only one of the many signs that showed how the industry was moving up towards making 4K the next resolution standard in the near future. After all, it cranked out 50 FPS or more in almost all AAA games running at 4K while previously you’d have to get a dual GPU card to get the same or more. 

The R9 290X, GTX 980 and 780 Ti were all great performers at 4K but for the generation of AAA games that were around back then, titles like Shadow of Mordor and GTA V presented scenarios where you’d experience inconvenient stuttering, which only the TITAN X made go away.

Zero1 Winner 2016: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 – GIGABYTE

The new TITAN X wasn’t available in India at the time, which left the GTX 1080 as the victor. AMD had no GPU to compete against the likes of the GTX 1080 at that moment. The ASUS ROG STRIX GTX1080 O8G GAMING and the GIGABYTE GTX 1080 XTREME GAMING PACK were neck and neck given they both had the exact same clock speeds and all our benchmark scores were within 1% or each other so we couldn’t decide between them easily. Looking at the cooling performance, we did notice that the ASUS card had slightly higher temperatures on full load. 

Also read: 5 retro-tech gadgets that won Digit Zero1 Award over 20 years ago

We didn’t overclock the cards for Zero1 but if were to consider the fact that the GIGABYTE card has a 12+2 VRM design as compared to the ASUS’ 8+2 design, then theoretically, the GIGABYTE would have had a more stable current allowing for stable overclocks. But more isn’t always better. However, considering the fact that gaming performance is the same, we resorted to temperature performance being the deciding factor to tip the scale and that made the GIGABYTE GTX 1080 EXTREME GAMING PACK the Zero1 Winner

Zero1 Winner 2017: ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti AMP! Extreme

The Titan Xp might have been NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card but it was more of a compute card rather than a gaming card, which is why we didn’t see board partners coming out with Titan Xp SKUs. So the next best thing was the GTX 1080 Ti. Among all the GTX 1080 Ti(s) that we received in 2017, the ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti AMP! Extreme was this year’s best performer. It was a 3-slot graphics card with a triple fan cooler that was built to ensure cool operation and had the thermal headroom should you further overclock the already factory-overclocked graphics card.

It charted a 3DMark Firestrike score of 23,371, which was the highest we had seen from any GTX 1080 Ti – NVIDIA’s reference card clocked in at around 22800. Also 4K gaming at 60 FPS was the norm when you pack a GTX 1080 Ti, as even a poorly optimised title like PUBG when played on Ultra setting at 4K resolution gave 40-45 FPS and that was quite impressive.

Zero1 Winner 2018: ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti O11G

Zero1 Winner 2019: ZOTAC RTX 2080 SUPER AMP EXTREME

Zero1 Winner 2020: ZOTAC RTX 3090 Trinity

Zero1 Winner 2021: ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3080 Ti AMP Extreme

Zero1 Winner 2022: ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO

Who will win the Zero1 Award 2023 for best graphics card of the year? Stay tuned and keep checking www.digit.in/zero1-awards for all the updates regarding Digit’s annual best products of the year awards.