The biggest winners in the history of „futureproofing” – buyers of older Radeon Graphics Cards on Terrascale architecture

„Future-proofing” is a controversial subject. I would argue that there are more losers than winners, when shopping for “potential future performance”, rather than current measurable performance. However, there is no denying that some people were able to “future-proof” themselves well beyond their wildest dreams.

Let’s roll the clock back 16 years and imagine it’s 2008. Radeon HD 5870 2GB GDDR5 has just been announced and promised its buyers a lifespan longer than the competition, by introducing new and exciting features such as support for upcoming DirectX 11, faster GDDR5 memory, and a huge 2GB VRAM buffer.

The buyers had reasons to believe, that their shiny new Radeons would last for a bit longer than the competition. But expecting 16 years wouldn’t be considered extremely optimistic. It would be pure insanity.

16 years before 2008 was the year 1992. You couldn’t future-proof your GPU purchase back then, because in 1992 the first-ever consumer GPU (GeForce 256) didn’t even exist yet. And neither did Doom 1, Quake 1, Wolfenstein 3D, PlayStation 1, Toy Story 1, DirectX 1, nor any other consumer-grade 3D graphics technology.

If you had a PC 16 years before Radeon HD 5870 2GB GDDR5 was released, in the best case scenario you were running Windows 3.11 on Intel 80486 - 50 MHz and support for up to 64 MB RAM.
In any case, even the best of the best PCs of 1992 would be completely unusable in 2008.

‘Fortunately’ (or at least fortunately for future-proofing enthusiasts), in 2008 the age of such exponential growth in performance and features was coming to an end.

16 years later GDDR5 memory type is still present in new graphics cards that are still manufactured (such as Nvidia GTX 1650 or Nvidia MX550).
16 years later you can still find 2GB VRAM variants of new graphics cards on the latest architectures, with support for cutting-edge features such as Ray Tracing and DLSS (such as Radeon 6300 or Nvidia T400).

16 years later, many games still rely on DirectX 11. What is more, Terrascale architecture turned out to be compatible with many important standards that were introduced later. DirectX 11.2 support was added as soon as it was released in 2013. And even DirectX 12 (the latest DirectX version as of now, released in 2015) was added (albeit slightly later – in 2016).

Speaking of software support along the way, Terrascale architecture also turned out to be compatible out of the gate with FSR upscaling introduced in 2021.
Open-source drivers also played a part in the longevity of software support. The latest community drivers were released in Q3 2022 (which doesn’t mean that games released later won’t work at all, but they will not receive driver-level performance optimizations). Still, 14 years of feature updates is far more than anyone could ever hope for.

16 years ago no one could have possibly imagined, that this graphics card would be able to handle (at low settings but still) many popular games played in 2024.
And I’m not talking about Minecraft and League of Legends. I’m talking about far more demanding titles such as:
Counter-Strike 2 (2023), Witcher 3 Next Gen (2022), Overwatch 2 (2022), Fortnite Unreal Engine 5 Upgrade (2022), Genshin Impact (2020), Apex Legends (2019), Control (2019) – all those games (and many more more) are perfectly playable - as long as you don’t mind lower settings and 30+ FPS.

Of course, it’s not like Radeon HD 5870 2GB GDDR5 can play every single modern game. Some of the latest hits such as Palworld, Baldur’s Gate 3, Helldivers 2, and Starfield are out of the question.
So in many ways, this graphics card is already obsolete.
But given how many games it can still handle, I am still confident that its original buyers were the biggest winners in the history of „futureproofing”.

Even if you didn’t get quite as lucky as them, but you still own an old AMD graphics card and are wondering how to get the most out of it in 2024, check out this article:
https://steemit.com/hardware/@hwtrendsetter/3-tricks-to-extend-the-lifespan-of-your-old-amd-graphics-card-forcing-fsr-installing-community-drivers-switching-to-steamos