Sapphire Wants AMD To Get Out Of The Way And Let It Go Nuts With GPU Designs

You may not realize it, but we've been here doing our thing at HotHardware since 1999; we remember the good (and bad) old days of the PC enthusiast scene. There was a time when graphics cards were a wild market. You could find Quantum3D Obsidian Voodoo cards with double the RAM and an extra TMU compared to the competition. As late as the GeForce256, you could find cards with hot-clocked RAM and binned GPUs that were 20% faster than another company's model. Even in the DirectX 11 era, it wasn't uncommon to find Radeon HD 5000 series cards with wacky outputs (like DMS-59 or 6x Mini-DisplayPort)--I even owned a pair of GeForce GTX 580 cards with 3GB of RAM onboard.

All of that has gone by the wayside for modern graphics cards. Now, the GPU makers like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel strictly define what a given ...