What was your first HOLY COW! moment with an actual video card?

euskalzabe

euskalzabe

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I remember mine well... for most of the 90s I had been playing Monkey Island 1, 2 and COMI (Curse of Monkey Island). Ocassionally stepped it up to Tomb Raider 1, 2 and 3 with Pentium CPU software (the Core Design MMX Hardware Emulation) graphics and that worked fine...

But then I saw Tomb Raider The Last Revelation and found that recreation of Egypt super realistic/interesting... so I thought I'd ask my cousin to help me build my 1st PC build. It was a Voodoo Banshee on a Pentium II 333, just before Nvidia announced that new GPU "thing" with the GF256. I was 14 in 1999. I clicked on Direct3D, fired up the game... the moment I saw Lara move around the screen with a resolution and fluidity unheard of to me until then, I actually remember jumping around the room and calling my best friend to immediately come to my cousin's place to witness the magic. Then we both jumped around the room talking about future game evenings with the rest of our friend group.

That moment (which makes me feel a bit nostalgic and old now) created the glee and excitement that has marked each new build, though newer ones have never matched the amazement of that Banshee moment in 1999. And it was all to play this, which is hilarious when you consider that my humble 1060 3GB can now fit the ENTIRE 642mb game in VRAM:

tr1.JPG


What was your HOLY COW! moment with a video card? Was it 2D? Or 3D? I'm curious to know what made you so excited about technology and games that 20 years later, here we are.
 
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GTX 570 was my first one.

My computers previously had been Laptops, so I haven't gotten a lot of performance off those guys, but GTX 570 was my first wow moment as it's the first time I have been able to play, coincidentally, WoW at constant 60fps.

From that point onwards, I can no longer tolerable sub 40 fps. This eventually led to SLI GTX 970 (wow factor too, as in wow, SLI is pretty darn annoying), and now 1080, but I'll never forget the moment with my GTX 570.
 
I remember going from monochrome to Hercules (mono screen but with graphics), then to CGA -> EGA and finally to VGA. While the bump up to EGA was great, the switch to VGA was the game changer. My VGA with a 15" flat square CRT was the bomb. I can't remember which card it was, since I went through so many- Tseng ETx000 (?), Guillemot Phoenix something or other, Ati xyz ... (I can't remember crap nowadays - getting old sucks!).
 
I don't remember the first, it was probably something with my Riva TNT2. My most recent was going from a 560Ti to a 1070 with DOOM. I went from ~15fps to a buttery smooth 60.
 
When I jumped from a basic 6600gt to a gtx9800.. Didn't feel much magic for me until I went from a 760 to a 1080 and ran things at 4k.
 
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Probably 9700 Pro on Far Cry.

That or first time I booted up dual 8800 GTXs SLI in Oblivion and Dark Messiah. Prior I was running dual 7800 GTOs which really lagged in those titles and dual 8800 GTXs was a near-100% jump in performance, it was like going from a stock Camaro to an F1 car.
 
Quake 2 timedemo1 with a Pentium 233mmx. Was using a VIA or AMD chip. I paid a fortune for it at the time from a local shop.
 
Voodoo 2 card, and some demo that came with it where I flew around with a helicopter in actual 3D, don't even remember the name of the game.

A close second might be when I scrounged every graphics card, computer, television and monitor in the house to play flight simulator across 4 displays.

I think in one of my rigs I was running dual monitors off of a radeon and a 3rd monitor off of some S4 pci card.
 
I dont remember the card unfortunately. Maybe a TNT2? But the game was Unreal.
 
I don't remember being totally blown away by anything with my first card as a kid (TNT2)... too long ago.

My first WOW moment that I do remember was getting a super alpha/beta version of Doom 3 working, in windowed mode like 640x480 on what I think was a Geforce 4 Ti4600? Some purple card. That monster in the bathroom :O

Second I remember was basically the beginning of Crysis. Being able to shoot down trees... amazing... think I was running a 6600GT at that time.
 
R420 baby!
Going from tnt2 to an x800xt, playing joint operations, doom3, hl2 (especially lost coast) and oblivion with mods. Made vanilla skyrim look meh half a decade later.
Doom3 still looks decent today I feel.
That x800 handled source engine on 1080p. Put a lot of work in for 256mb.
 
My first WOW factor was caused by Blade of Darkness (AKA Blade: The Edge of darkness AKA Severance: Blade of Darkness) with a Riva TNT2 ultra game was smooth as shit at 1024x768, no other game on 2001 known to me was able to deliver that kind of amazing graphics and playability.
 
First PC I built myself with a pair of 8800GTX. Came from a single 7900GS AGP in a previous PC my dad and I built together. The first thing I fired up was Doom 3 at 1920x1080 on my 55" DLP with everything cranked to Ultra, and I couldn't stop giggling. The next day I found out I didn't setup SLI properly and I was "only" running the game at around 80 FPS on a single card (this was before the patch that disabled unlocked framerate as a config file option). When Crysis came out my hardcore hardware friend was jelly I could run it on almost all very high settings at 1600x1200 at around 50-60 FPS (ironically, he was waiting for the ATi HD 2900 XT to come out).
 
GLQuake with the 3Dfx Glide wrapper on my Voodoo Rush, coming from a basic video card. Even though I had already been through Quake about 2 dozen times, seeing it in actual hardware-rendered 3D was like playing it as a brand new game all over again.
 
Motoracer with my v1. I went front last place to first place :). Also tomb raider 1 was pretty epic :)
 
My first would be Unreal on an Matrox M3d. It looked awesome.
 
When I went from playing on a Pentium 166 with a Trident Blade 3d to a Duron 750 with a GF2 MX. Games looked amazing
 
Voodoo 1 (specifically a monster 3D) and GLquake: Oh my god, this is 3D! And I can play against all those people ONLINE?! YOU CAN MOD THIS?!! -instant addict

Blew $2500 when I had nothing buying a prebuilt computer just because of that, was one of those cheap places doing custom part lists in computer shopper back when it was still as thick as the yellow pages. They fucked the build up several ways, eventually had to get a new motherboard. Wish I had gone with another vendor that was doing ATX(!) systems back then, it was only like $50 more and had a better reputation. I only have to be burned once to learn, that was the first and only prebuilt computer I ever bought for gaming or workstation.
 
Actual as opposed to what, a non-actual video card {8^P
MSI GTX 460 Cyclone, I mean, there's been no cooler looking cooler before or since and play-wise it was stellar.
First "wow' moment regarding a game was Myst and then HL-2
 
CPU based graphics to 3dfx/Matrox/Rendition versions...Mechwarrior 2 was OMFG

and well MechWarrior 2 in general

oh and my 1080 dying after I set power target to %80...although Cow wasn't the word I used
 
GL Quake on Voodoo Graphics.

And then experiencing the even-more-wonderful VQuake on my new Rendition v2200 card. You just don't understand the glory of edge AA back in the days of that 640x480 mess :D

didn't experience such beautiful AA again until my first MSAA card, the 6600GT
 
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I remember the Matrox G400 Tech Demo, lights and shadows and colors and reflections and a little fairy flying around a cabin.

Found a vid of it:



This was the card I had before I got my OMFG BFG 6800 Ultra OC, pretty far out in 1999 or so. :) Was paired with a Slot A Athlon 550 OC'd to 700. The BFG 6800 OC was from about 2004, paired with a AMD Socket 939 chip, I'm thinking 2400+ or something like that?
 
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A jump from a 9800 Pro to an x800xt-pe and firing up FarCry with ‘all’ the eye candy turned on. I was like :wideyed: :whistle: :cry:
 
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