PC hardware timeline, 1998 to today

The fastest CPU and graphics card of each year in our database.

1998–1999: The Pentium II and Voodoo era. Windows 98 ships, 3D accelerators go mainstream and a 400 MHz CPU is a serious machine.

2000–2003: The gigahertz race. Intel and AMD fight for the first gigahertz, then for 3 GHz. GPUs add programmable shaders.

2004–2006: The dual-core turn. Clock speeds stall, so CPUs add cores. PCI Express replaces AGP and Windows Vista arrives.

2007–2011: Quad cores and DirectX 11. Core 2 and Nehalem set the pace. Fermi and Evergreen bring DirectX 11.

2012–2016: Efficiency years. Process shrinks mean cooler, quieter machines. SSDs become standard and 4K appears.

2017–2020: Ryzen shakes things up. AMD returns with Zen, core counts jump, and ray tracing debuts on GPUs.

2021–2025: Hybrid cores and AI. Big/little CPU designs, DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and GPUs sized for ray tracing and upscaling.