The [H]ardforum video card all time power ranking poll nomination thread.

T&L was GeForce 256.
Nvidia bought voodoo and implemented it into their Geforce cards. It was tested in house by 3Dfx & later implemented after Nvidia had bought them. Technically, it was on 3Dfx first (Insert actually meme)
 
Nvidia bought voodoo and implemented it into their Geforce cards. It was tested in house by 3Dfx & later implemented after Nvidia had bought them. Technically, it was on 3Dfx first (Insert actually meme)
Speaking of T&L anyone remember environmental bump mapping? IIRC Matrox was the first with it in hardware. I miss Matrox, they'd probably be up to J6500 now. ;-)
 
Speaking of T&L anyone remember environmental bump mapping? IIRC Matrox was the first with it in hardware. I miss Matrox, they'd probably be up to J6500 now. ;-)
GeForce 3 first support from the nvidia side. Someone else had it frist
 
Nvidia bought voodoo and implemented it into their Geforce cards. It was tested in house by 3Dfx & later implemented after Nvidia had bought them. Technically, it was on 3Dfx first (Insert actually meme)
Hardware first time was GeForce 256. That was the claim to fame. I had one. It sucked.
 
Hardware first time was GeForce 256. That was the claim to fame. I had one. It sucked.
I didn't get a 256, I had the Diamond Viper 770 which was a TNT2 at the time. I did however get a Geforce 2, I remember this demo for it.


At the time, i thought it was the coolest shit ever.
 
I didn't get a 256, I had the Diamond Viper 770 which was a TNT2 at the time. I did however get a Geforce 2, I remember this demo for it.


At the time, i thought it was the coolest shit ever.

Demos were awesome, don’t get me wrong, but for non T&L stuff I had it benching less than the TNT2 Ultra I had prior. So I thought it sucked. Granted, this was eons ago, but I sold it and kept the TNT till I jumped to something else
 
Nvidia bought voodoo and implemented it into their Geforce cards. It was tested in house by 3Dfx & later implemented after Nvidia had bought them. Technically, it was on 3Dfx first (Insert actually meme)
The GeForce 256 came out more than a year before NVIDIA acquired 3Dfx. I'd like to see the receipts that 3Dfx had it first.
 
I didn't get a 256, I had the Diamond Viper 770 which was a TNT2 at the time. I did however get a Geforce 2, I remember this demo for it.


At the time, i thought it was the coolest shit ever.

I thought this one was cool, it was included with the original GeForce 256 in '99.



I remember if you clicked like mad (use a double click button on mouse!) on that bubble it would distort like crazy and you'd wind up inside of it. On Pentium III systems it was super choppy when moving around (when inside the bubble) but Athlon systems it was super smooth. Not sure why.
 
I think the 8800GT was the card that was most influential for its time mainly because of the price. Before that, you had to have an 8800 GTX (which were expensive at the time), the GTS was lackluster for the price, and it brought Crysis to everyone at playable rates. They reused that die so many times afterwards.
 
Also 6800GT cards could be flashed with ultra BIOS (clocks) essentially garnering ultra performance from a much cheaper card. Almost like the days of running Celeron 300As at 464 (504 if you got lucky!) which smoked PII 450s at a quarter of the price!
 
1) PowerVR Kyro 2
2) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
3) 3dfx Voodoo 2

The Kyro 2 was my favourite card. Unfortunately the Linux driver situation sucked. But it was able to outperform vastly more expensive cards from the competition in a number of games. It was so good that it provoked NVidia to reveal their true self by spreading lies and FUD and using other underhanded tactics (article in German) against PowerVR. While PowerVR is no longer making desktop GPUs, I guess NVidia never really changed in all those years.

View attachment 320563

The other cards I did not own myself, but was quite impressed by them.

I had a Kyro 2 back in the day. It was a very unique chip.

However, Hercules quality was crap. Mine failed very quickly and started artifacting. The replacement did the same.
 
I had a Kyro 2 back in the day. It was a very unique chip.

However, Hercules quality was crap. Mine failed very quickly and started artifacting. The replacement did the same.
Those blue heatsinks on ram chips fell off mine! (Prophet II 64MB) Looks like they were glued on with the same stuff they use to affix credit cards to the letter they send them out with! Yikes!
I pulled all of them off, cleaned up everything nicely with MEK and used AS epoxy to reattach. No issues with them coming off and the card worked fine even with decent o/c for the rest of its life.

Now that I think about it, 64MB RAM! My CPU has more L3 cache than that! :)
 
Vooodo 1 was the largest jump in performance I ever encountered, it was massive compared to the awful 3D acceleration we had prior.
But before that I bought a PowerVR card and was so disappointed with its performance I contacted the company.
They sent me a pre-release PowerVR2 on trial with the proviso if I wanted to keep it I would return my version 1 card to them and pay a large sum of cash to keep it.
This was also really crap so they didnt hear from me again lol.
Then I bought the Voodoo card and saw what my friends had been harping on about for ages!

All this talk of the 8800GTX.... I just checked, and I still have mine! :)
I do too, only I didnt ever buy one :)
Some time later I upgraded my PC and gave my brother my GTX580 and asked for his old 8800GTX card as a spare. (I previously had an 8800GT which was a great card but that was given away)
Its still working great.
 
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