It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn’t even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.
I don’t know what hardware my first computer had because I didn’t even know what a GPU was at the time… But the first GPU I ever bought was the 8600 GT.
I forgot the first one, but I remember I upgraded it to an ATi Rage Pro so I could play Baldur’s Gate, which needed 8 megabytes of video ram. Later I paired it with a Voodoo 2. I think it was the Diamond Monster one. And that one got replaced with a Matrox G200, which got replaced with Kyro II. I picked some odd cards back then.
A Matrox Millennium.
First custom pc I got had a NVIDIA 6600 gt
The first one I got was some integrated cirrus logics chip that didn’t even have 3d acceleration. The first one I bought with my own money was a GeForce 7800GT in late 2005
Nvidia GeForce 8400gs
Went great with my duo core 🥲 for that buttery smooth 30fps
Trident VGA?
I got a 3DFX voodoo as soon as they came out. GL quake was mind-blowing.
I bought a Riva TNT
Then a GeForce 2
Then a Radeon 9000
Then for a bunch of years I just moved into laptop after laptop with discrete GPUs.
Now I still have a 1080 and a 2070 doing a little bit of light AI work and video transcoding for me. But I’m still relying on crappy laptop GPUs for all my gaming. They’re good enough.
I got a 3Dfx from a computer fair in Liverpool just so I could play Quake 2 CTF, it was absolutely mind blowing not even an understatement.
I was rocking Geeforce 2 and Soundblaster AWE 32. Good times😄
I’m amazed at how many people remember the hardware they purchased 30 years ago.
If you hold onto your cards for 6-7 years, that’s only around 5 cards.
Mine goes:
- RTX 4070
- GTX 1080
- GFX 5200 (I think?)
- (The Playstation 2 years)
- (The Playstation years)
- 3dfx Voodoo
You never forget your first.
First and last. Radeon 9600xt
Radeon HD 6570, bit humble. Still not very powerful, I only have a GTX 950 at best, I don’t PC game much these days
I think it was S3 Virge. Remember playing Tomb Raider with smooth textures.
Voodoo Banshee, so I could play Quake, Unreal and Deus Ex.
It was a shiny EGA card.
On an 8-bit ISA bus, with a whopping 64kB of VRAM. It could display an amazing 16 colours on one screen.
My friend who had a CGA card was so jelly with his four eye-soaring neon colours.
If we’re talking accelerated graphics, I bought a voodoo 2 with 8mb of RAM which linked up to my ATI Mach 64 2d-card.
I remember when the EGAs came about. Damn, it was like stepping into the future. But I didn’t have a color monitor so it didn’t matter. I was probably more envious than your friend.
GeForce GT 610.
It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.
