What was the very first video card you ever bought?

Brent_Justice said:
This was my jam back in the day, once I upgraded to Voodoo 2, Need for Speed II SE on Voodoo 2, what a dream

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Ha, it was actually this game that made me get into upgrading my computer.

I vaguely recall there being a restriction where you couldn't change the camera to "cockpit" view unless you had a more powerful video card.

The game itself also had a pretty active modding community for the time - you could download all sorts of crazy custom cars to drive.
 
S3 virge, 3dfx banshee, voodoo 3 2000, geforce 3, radeon 9600xt, fx 5900, 6800gt, 7800gtx, 8800 gts, gtx 260, gtx 285, radeon 5870, 470 sli for surround, gtx 670, radeon 7970, gtx 970.

That's just from my primary rigs.
 
Mine was a Riva TNT. One of the first things I spent money on after getting my first job.
 
My very first video card would have to be a Cirus Logic that was in my first ever pc purchase back in 95 which was a 486dx2x66, a 2x cdrom reader, 3.5 floppy drive, a Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card, 8mb of ram, 500mb hard drive, 14.4k us robotics modem, canon bubble jet printer and a 15 inch super vga CRT monitor. Whole package along with windows 3.1 and dos 6.22 cost me 3k cad !!
 
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The first video card I had in my own computer was a Matrox Mystique with 4MB of video ram! I had jelly friends. I had access to other computers before then. Such as a Tandy 486 and my dads first Pentium 100MHz with Windows 95 but they weren't mine.
The first video card I actually purchased was a Voodoo 2 8MB from a friend.
 
This was the first video card I had in the very first PC I owned....
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3dfx Voodoo. Still being used in my sisters, ex husband, hand her down rig. She got the car, cat and the house.
 
First card was I believe a Diamond 2D card. First 3D card was a Voodoo 1 (with external dongle to 2d card).
 
Monster Card. Paired this with my Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. Before that nothing but hand me downs. Went with the TNT2 Ultra after this.
 
The Trident 8900 ISA SVGA.

Side note: My Father and older brother colluded to switch it with an EGA card he (older brother) had in his comp assuming I wouldn't notice the difference at 12 years old. Busted!

Yes. I'm old.

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Does this count?

KL_Hercules_HGC.jpg


Links to WikiMedia... I don't have the card or computer any more...
 
It was something from ....... trying to remember ......... Yes, it was an old Diamond PCI card.

And the next one I remember was a Voodoo Monster 3D and life was good.

I have to say though, just like many of you I have bought many cards over the years but some stand out over the rest.

The first Voodoo Monster cards for bringing us a true 3D video experience.
The Voodoo 3 for getting rid of the pass-thru and giving us a single-card solution.
The first GForce cards simply outstripped everything else.
The first Radeon which was an engineering marvel next to the GForce cards of that time.

I suppose the next would be the ones that brought us SLI and Eye-Finity.

And the next hurdle in my mind is a single card multi-monitor 4K capable card so that SLI and Eye-Finity can join the others in video card nostalgia.
 
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My first graphics card I bought with my own money was a Cirrus Logic ISA card that was part of a complete soup-to-nuts upgrade from 386SX-16 to 386DX-40 - the HDD was the only thing that didn't get replaced right then.
Two years later I went to work for a local computer retailer that also sold into the local BYOPC community - which meant I also got access to parts at cost. This was 1996. Six months later, the first clones of the Intel Seattle (Intel 440BX Slot-1 Pentium-II motherboard) started showing up, and I would in fact buy one for myself as a birthday present (A-Trend AT-6120); this same board would hold my second AIW (which was my first that took the AGP bus to work) - the ATI All-In-Wonder Pro; I tag-teamed with a generic 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card (from Best Data, of all brands) - it was also the system that I first came on to [H] with. It didn't get replaced until the original UNserver (the SMP-ready ABIT VP6) which hosted a single S370 P-III Tuliatin-S in the 1 GHz configuration, 1 GB of SDRAM, and Windows 2000 Professional (I couldn't run 98 SE because I actually had too MUCH system RAM, and I refused to consider Windows ME for security reasons). Tag-teaming ATI and 3dfx made sense because each graphics solution had strengths when it came to gaming - 3dfx (Voodoo Graphics and later Voodoo II) for OpenGL/GLide/D3D 16-bit) and ATI (Rage through Radeon) for D3D 32-bit - and I let individual game API options (and my eyes) choose which to use for a particular game. (I coined the phrases "Voodoo Rage" and "Voodoo Radeon" for the respective tag-teams.)

This same period was also when I started passing down (not selling) systems that I was leaving - I only sold ONE complete system that period - and that was strictly at the request of the buyer (because of a change to the system as it stood - a larger HDD).
The original UNserver got passed down to my Mom, in fact when I built UNserver II (the P4-Northwood-driven ATX mid-tower; the case from this system is, in fact, the case I am using today)

What stood about among the graphics cards (from then to now)?
The AIWs, mostly, did NOT sacrifice gaming power to TV viewability (depending on the game, you could have TV in a window and a game in another window - at the same time) which resulted in some rather odd lashups - Forsaken and the US (tennis) Open for example.
AIW 8500DV - the first digital AND cable-ready TV tuner in the line.
AIW 9700 Pro - no more underclocking compared to the non-AIW counterparts (the only minus the AIWs had compared to their non-AIW stablemates - other than the price premium). The AIW 9700 Pro was the last AIW I would buy at all (though not the last ATI-powered graphics card).
 
The first honest, legitimate graphics card I purchased was a S3 911a followed by a S3 928 a week later due to the S3 911a having less than stellar performance at 1024 x 768. Once the original VooDoo hit the stores I was in heaven.
 
This topic was well timed and I would like jarablue to accept my thanx for reminding me why it's so important to follow the better engineered product whoever it is that happens to make it at any given time. That crown has flopped back and forth between AMD and NVidia too many times to count. But today as I sit on the fence ready to pull the trigger on another upgrade with my eye on 3440x1440 curved wide screen bliss, this maxim comes to mind thanx to him.

I was tempted to go with the rather nice sales prices that are popping up for the 980 Ti cards as opposed to the initially inflated prices of the brand new 1070 cards. This topic and a trip back to the days of the first Radeon cards brought back a simple truth. Any time someone releases a product that performs better while using less power and producing less heat, that is a superior engineered solution and a better product. And that is how you know where to put your money.
 
First video card for me was a Trident VESA Local bus card with 1 meg of Ram. I could play Wolfenstein 3D at max 320x200 resolution!
 
My first video card (excluding the integrated video in VIC-20 and Commodore64) was a Tseng ColorPAK Color Graphics Adapter w/16KB (yes, kilobytes - it is not a typo).

Got it in 1984 with my first IBM PC-XT, had to put off buying a 32 megabyte hard drive (again, not a typo) for nearly a year as I wanted colour on the screen and I figured I had 2 floppy drives so why worry?

Nobody told me at the time that with CGA you got a choice of 4 colours, all of them ugly.
 
Radeon 5670
512MB GDDR5
Loved this little thing. Played games @ 1680x1050, medium settings. All I needed
 
My first GPU was the good ole gts8800...I seriously loved that card. It was apart of my very first custom build pc...The next card was the gtx580, and now the gtx 1080 xtreme...whenever I get my hands on it.
 
my first crd was a s3 trio something i believe. but it came with my 386 PC
first card i bought stand alone was voodoo or tnt

DrDoU said:
bought same card.To bad 3dfx went out of business.Actually had 2 in SLI.cable connected the two those were some hot running cards no hearsinks
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Im pretty sure you did not have a voodoo1 in SLI.
SLI came with the vodoo 2
 
First GPU was a S3 Virge DX which even new at the time was a turd, but it was cheap! I upgraded it to a Savage 4 Pro (Diamond Stealth III S540) because of the touted S3TC. S3TC was huge at the time to give higher details with a minimal hit in performance in games that actually supported it like Unreal Tournament and Quake3.
 
It was an Nvidia 6200 OC and I was severely disappointed :p It turned me into an enthusiast though first by learning how to overclock and eventually seeking a new card which led to a full build.
 
The first Video card I bought I believe was a Diamond Edge 3D 2xx0 SGS STG2000 model. I soon switched that to a Riva128, then Voodoo3 3000 and then GeForce3 Ti200, then ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and so on and so forth. I had a lot of video card changes/upgrades in my systems.
 
Geforce FX 5200

Only later did I realize it was awful. I mostly played Age of Empires, Unreal Tournament and Total Annihilation, so it probably didn't matter.
 
I don't remember what the very first card I had in a computer was. I didn't start building my own until 2011. I bought a Radeon 6850 for my first build, and I'm still running it. Been running hot the last couple of months but otherwise it's always played everything I've thrown at it.
 
The first one I remember purchasing on my own, was a S3 Trio64V+. Certainly not my first card though.
 
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