I wasn’t aware of that! Thanks for bringing that up. Those had mixed reviews, didn’t they?

I think the popularity of cryptocurrency mining just happened to save some of these cards as their compute power was very useful.

Yup, the Fury X. It was the only one to feature it and consumers weren’t very impressed given the enthusiast price-point but general inability to overclock the RAM.

It wasn’t a bad idea. The card did pretty well for 1440p and 4K gaming at the time. However it just really didn’t offer any truly solid advantage nor any innovative uses of the memory. I owned two of these (bought separately over the course of a year) and don’t regret the purchases, but certainly wouldn’t have repeated that decision if I went back in time.

I think the higher bandwidth was better put to use in data centers, primarily those of CloudFlare for DDoS mitigation.