AMD lost the lead again for several years, struggling with the Radeon R200 and R300 series against NVIDIA’s Maxwell and Pascal. But the spirit of Evergreen—the idea that a scrappy underdog could leapfrog a giant with bold engineering and perfect timing—lives on. It’s the same DNA that would later give us the Ryzen CPU revolution in 2017. Today, a working Radeon HD 5870 is a museum piece. You can buy one on eBay for $30. It can’t run modern AAA games at high settings. But fire up Crysis (2007), Portal 2 , or Skyrim on an HD 5870, and it still sings.

The engineering challenge was brutal. To be first, they had to tape out (finalize the design) on a brand-new, unproven 40nm manufacturing process from TSMC. The previous 55nm process was stable, but 40nm was plagued with high leakage and low yields. They also had to pack nearly 2.15 billion transistors onto a die not much larger than a postage stamp.

DirectX 11 was a massive deal. It introduced (smoother surfaces), Compute Shaders (using the GPU for non-graphics tasks), and better multi-threading. NVIDIA’s current cards only supported DirectX 10. AMD realized that if they could launch a full DX11 lineup before NVIDIA, they would own the future.

In the late 2000s, the graphics card world had a clear pecking order. NVIDIA was the king. Their GeForce GTX 200 series, particularly the monstrous GTX 280 and later the refined GTX 285, were the undisputed performance champions. AMD (then ATI, before the 2006 acquisition) had been playing catch-up with their Radeon HD 4000 series. While the HD 4870 and 4890 offered great value, they couldn't quite topple NVIDIA’s single-GPU crown.