Do you remember your first graphics card?

My first 3d card was the Obsidian X-24, the original sli! lol.

BEERCARD.JPG
 
Ti-99/4a (have a photo of me playing Parsec)
Sinclair Spectrum (have a photo of me playing Manic Miner)
Commodore 64 (have a photo of me playing Nodes of Yesod)
Aminga 500 (have a photo of me playing Marble Madness)
Amiga 1200 (have a photo of me playing Frontier Elite 2)
Daewoo luggable 'laptop' with mono screen and 386 SX16
Trident 1mb ISA (ugh, but it was only a 386dx/40 playing Alone in the dark)
Cirrus Logic VL Bus (For Strike commander)
Diamond Viper 64
Voodoo1
Voodoo2
Voodoo2 Sli (great days!)
Geforce Annihilator SDR
Geforce Annihilator DDR
Geforce 2 Hercules one (cost a bloody fortune)
Geforce 3
Geforce 4 Ti4600
ATi 9700 Pro (Great Card!)
Geforce 6600GT
Geforce 7800GT
Geforce 7900GTX
Geforce 7900GTX Sli
Geforce 8800GTX
Geforce 8800GTX SLi
Geforce GTX 280
and finally GTX280SLi

Probably missed a couple of duffers but they were the main ones. Of all the ones ive had fondest memories of Voodoo2 Sli, cost me a fortune but Ive never been happier than zipping round the tracks in Motorhead in native glide on a steering wheel. I really felt the future had arrived
 
I still enjoy looking up the old graphics cards to laugh at their tiny little heatsinks.
Or perhaps cry about the large ones of today...

gf4ti4600board.jpg
 
galland1 said:
Dont remeber what it was but the video card had sockets for memory upgrade. The Mobo also had sockets for cache chips and co processor. Ordered the chips for about 8 bucks, the co-processor for not much more and boy did dos and windows 3.0 fly. Next computer was a Micron IBM clone. 4 megs of ram. I think the upgrade to 8 meg was between 200 and 300 $. Lots of fun with Autoexec.bat's Oh and that first 2x hp cd rom. I was in heaven.
Click to expand...


Oh boy you just clicked my memory and i recalled those moments when i was able to change xms to ems, disable sound by editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. I lost this knowledge....with those new cozy technologies.....i loved my 486SX 25 mhz to the bits.
 
young'ns back in my day we spent hours re-sorting config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get ever last bit of useable ram out of that 640kb

:p
 
Sure my first decent system I could run hl1 on and stuff was a system with an intel i740 8mb card.
 
8500GT got on my birthday, its was like $180.00 back then..if I only waited and just bought a 8800, i'd be straight good. Card is currently on my little brothers school computer.
 
The first one i know of is an old Diamond Viper V550 ATX TNTA AGP 16mb... I ripped it out of the old family pc two days ago.. lol

Then i had a GeForce 4 Ti4200, then a GeForce 8800Ultra (which is currently being RMA'd...)
 
First 'real' graphics card was a MONSTROUS Voodoo 2... at the time, I had no idea what it was.

My first graphics card that I purchased for gaming purposes (don't laugh damnit) was an MX4000 (PCI) with an incredible 64mb's of video memory. I was running a Pentium III based Celeron at 1GHz with a whopping 128mb of ram.

Know WHY I decided I needed a graphics card? Some stupid lord of the rings (the fellowship of the ring) game wouldn't run without one. That solely is the reason I got so hardcore into pc technology and hardware, and why i'm currently majoring in computer engineering.

My favorite graphics card by FAR was the 9800Pro (MSI edition, flashed to XT speeds!). No doubt about it. I'm an ATi fanboy forever, simply because of that card.
 
Voodoo Banshee. I think I almost busted a nut playing Death Karz on that baby. The 9800 pro was after that and is (sadly) still my current card.
 
The first one I actually remember is a GeForce2 MX420, I had a PC before that but I have no idea what was in it.
 
Don't even know what kind of graphics my first Tandy computer had in it. Now days that is the first thing you look at when putting together a unit.
 
Mine were as far as I can remember...

Voodoo 3 2500 with tv tuner
GF256
GF2 Ultra 64mb...now that was a dandy card.
GF3 Ti 200 256mb
Creative 5900
GF6800 Ultra
BFG 7800GTX OC 256mb
2 x HD4870X2's

happy days.....:D
 
Man... how on earth could I possibly remember the onboard video for our first computer? =P It ran Age of Empires 1 just fine though.

Video cards I actually remember having:
S3 8mb Onboard Video
Radeon 7500
Radeon 9200
Radeon 9600 Pro
Radeon 9600XT
Geforce 6600GT
Radeon X1950Pro
Geforce 9600GT
 
Let's see if I can remember...

First computer was a DOS machine so I have no clue.
S3 Trio 64 (I think)
GeForce 2 MX
Radeon 7500 AIW
Radeon 9800se with pro softmod
Radeon X1900GT
Radeon HD 4850

As you can see ever since I built my own computer I've been an ATI fanboy of sorts.
 
From Wikipedia, My TI99/4A rocked! Smoked the pathetic 8-bit IBM PCs of the time!

Video: TI TMS9918A VDP ( Distinct in being the only chip on the TI motherboard which had a heat sink.)
32 single-color sprites in defined layers allowing higher-numbered sprites to transparently flow over lower-numbered sprites. Sprites were available at 8x8 pixels or 16x16 pixels, with a 'magnify' bit that doubled all sprites' size but not their resolution. A single bit was available in hardware for coincidence (collision detection), and the console supported automatic movement via an interrupt routine in the ROM. There could be no more than 4 sprites per horizontal scanline.

16 fixed colors (15 visible, one color reserved for 'transparent' which merely showed the background color. Transparent was intended for the 9918's genlock functionality used in conjunction with TI's Video Controller Card. This feature was demonstrated in October 1999 at an international TI meeting near Stuttgart, Germany. (This would have required a hardware modification to the console itself, as the video input line is not routed on the motherboard.)

Text mode: 40×24 characters (256 6×8 user-defineable characters, no sprites, foreground and background color only, not accessible in BASIC)

Graphics mode: 32×24 characters (256 8×8 user-definable characters, full 15 color palette + transparent (available in groups of 8 through the character table) and 32 sprites (The only mode available in BASIC. Extended BASIC is required for sprites, and can only access 28 of them.)

Bitmap mode: 256×192 pixels (no more than two colors in an eight pixel row, full 15 color palette + transparent, all 32 sprites available but interrupt-based motion through the ROM routine is not due to the memory layout, not available to BASIC or the original 9918). Bitmap mode could be arranged in such a way as to use less memory but still provide improved color or improved pattern layout, leading to the popularity of so-called "half-bitmap" modes. In fact these modes were not undocumented modes of the VDP (which fully documented this masking) but simply clever layout of Bitmap mode.

Multicolor mode: 64×48 pixels (each pixel may be any color, all 32 sprites are available)
All of the above comprise 36 "layers" starting with the video overlay input, then the background color, then two graphics mode layers, then a layer for each of the 32 sprites. A higher layer would obscure a lower layer in hardware, unless that higher layer was transparent
 
+1 to the TI-99/4a, my very first computer, remember Parsec, Munch Man,Alpiner and TI--Invaders :D Happy times
 
First 3d card: S3 Virge 2MB with ram expansion slot
First 3d card that could actually accelerate games: Voodoo Banshee 16MB
 
Diamond Monster 3D back in the good old days of 3dfx.
I also had a Matrox that I don't quite remember the model. It had DuelHead support and WOW. Bump mapping. It was a card ahead of the competition back in the days.
 
ATI Rage II 8mb video card. I beat freaking Diablo 2 on that in software mode on a Pentium 2 400mhz with 64mbs of ram lol. Good times.
 
hm... first one I installed myself was a Ti-4200. I was out of pc gaming for a long time in between that purcahse and the computer I got before it.
 
All I remembered was that I had a ATI pci 32mb graphics card as my first card :)*forgot the model though*
 
voodoo3 2000 pci card
geforce 2 mx agp card
ati 9600 pro agp
ati x800gto pcie
8800gts 640mb
8800gts 512mb(step up ftw)
 
The first card I remember knowing what it was was an ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8MB AGP 4x back in 98'/99'. But the first video card I ever worked on was a Trident MGA 512KB.

Brings back memories!
 
In order of ownership :p
List of 3D Cards
Quantum3d Raven (Voodoo Banshee)
Geforce4 4200
Geforce 5200 FX
Geforce 6600 GT
Geforce 7800 GT
Geforce 6800 GT
Geforce 7600m (notebook)
Geforce 8800GTS
Geforce 8600m (notebook)
Geforce 8800GT
Geforce 8400m (notebook)
Geforce 8600GTS
Geforce GTX260 (Current Card in main computer)
Radeon 3650**
Geforce 8800GTX** (Current Card in spare computer)

**cards that have been in my current spare computer
 
Hmm, for me my first was a Trident 3D Image card I believe, sounds right anyways.

From there it would be:
Onboard Nforce2 crap
Ti4400
9600 Pro
9800 Pro All-in-Wonder
9800 Pro
another 9800 Pro
6600GT
7800GTX
another 6600GT
8600m GT (lappy)
2x GTX 285 SLI :)
 
Voodoo2 flashed to work in my beige 233MHz PowermacG3. Needed to get my Falcon4.0 on!
 
STB Rage II (came with the machine)
Voodoo 3 3500 TV.
Geforce Ti300 Ultra
Geforce Ti500
9800 Pro
X800 XT/PE
HD 4870 1GB

Just for shits and giggles:

That first machine was a Gateway with the following specs:

PII 333
64mb SDRAM
STB Rage II
2.8 GB Quantum HDD

I paid about $2500 for it new in 98. :eek:
 
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