OpenGL Performance & Performance-Per-Watt For NVIDIA GPUs From The Past 10 Years

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive had to be run at 2560 x 1600 so the newer GPUs would at least be busy, but in doing so, the pre-Fermi graphics cards couldn't handle this modern Valve game at more than a few frames per second. It's stunning to see how NVIDIA graphics performance has improved over the past decade, particularly since Kepler: it's over a 100x difference from the high-end GTX 900 series to the GeForce 8 hardware.

A look at the power consumption during the CS:GO benchmarking.

As interesting as the raw performance is the power efficiency with the magnitude of how much more efficient the Maxwell graphics cards are since the GeForce 8 days. From the GeForce 8500GT to GTX 950 is a 37x improvement in performance-per-Watt while with from the GeForce 8 series to the GTX 970/980 it peaks at 50x.