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

6800 Ultra was my first flagship card and I had to have the right 12v amp power supply for it which was another $150 back then.. played with SLi in 7900GTO so the candy has always been desired.
 
AppleII -> anything on Amiga 500 for me. Everything since Amiga was a steady progression.

UT with S3TC brought up the most "aaahs" and "wooaaahs" when friends came over, though. Can't remember which GeForce I ran it on, maybe 256.
 
I think the first really holy cow moment was the first time I ran GL Quake on my first 3dfx Voodoo card. But there were moments before this while I had the Amiga 500 and 1200. Can't really say my C64 provided to many holy cow moments iirc.
 
2D - Upgrading from a 256 color, 256KB ISA card (which impressed me over my NES, but didn't blow me away) to a 16bit color, 1MB VESA local bus card. No dithering on color images I had sitting around from BBS downloads, that I could previously only view in 256 colors. I sat there in shock that a computer could do that.

3D - Unreal and Forsaken running my friend's Canopus Pure3D (Voodoo 1). It was mindblowing to me at the time. Immediately bought a Voodoo Rush, then went 32bit color with Matrox G200 and later TnTs. Have been hooked on PC graphics ever since.
 
When my family got it's first computer on Christmas 1994. A Pentium 133MHz and my mom bought me Under a Killing Moon (no idea how she knew about this game, I didn't ask for it).

OMG, full 3D environments and FMV characters. Coming from the SNES I had at that time, this blew me away.

 
cybereality said:
When my family got it's first computer on Christmas 1994. A Pentium 133MHz and my mom bought me Under a Killing Moon (no idea how she knew about this game, I didn't ask for it).

OMG, full 3D environments and FMV characters. Coming from the SNES I had at that time, this blew me away.

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I still have that game and the sequels. I always loved playing them and still do. Would love them to make another.
 
Now that I thought about it even more, my very very first WOW moment was when I saw Wing Commander being played in full SVGA color at a local computer shop back in 1990.
 
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I would have to say my first omg moment was upgrading my TNT1 to a Voodo5 5500 and firing up Quake 3 in all of its glory :) It was the start of an addiction with SLI and shiny goodness on my 24" Dell Sony Trinitron.

Close second was recently hooking up an Oculus Rift and Robo Recall... pretty fun stuff :)
 
jologskyblues said:
Now that I thought about it even more, my very very first WOW moment was when I saw Wing Commander being played in full SVGA color at a local computer shop back in 1990.
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Well you got me! I remember buying the game and trying to play it on a 486 CPU. No go! I moved to a new back then Pentium 90 and the difference was huge! I remember playing this game with my cousin and were both amazed at the difference.


Then the next WOW moment was with Quake & the very first Tomb Rider on a Voodoo 1 card with Matrox Milleniun for 2D back then. I had pre-ordered the Voodoo card and received it before even the games were fully functional (waiting on patches).



Before that I had purchased the very first card Nvidia Ever released - the Edge 3D that was also a sound card and played Virtua Fighter and some other nonsense on it for the first time on PC.

Now I feel old in here....
 
;) cheerish those moments.. those memories of back in the day of pc gaming are priceless!

Build a time machine and I'm going back to the days of quake 2/3 ffa At it's peek! I doubt I'll ever experience such a rush ever again. The happiest days I can remember.
 
Dark Forces II on VoodooII and then Battlefield 1942 with the ATi 9700Pro when I could finally really use anti-aliasing. Oblivion with 8800GTX was good too.
 
Seeing Dungeon Siege for the first time in summer of '02.

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Diablo in 3D??!! (at the time, it was a beautiful game)
 
Me and my buddy both got computers around the same time period. His was a slightly higher spec, a Compaq with the 233 MHz Pentium MMX, 6 GB harddrive, and 64MB of RAM, while mine was an HP with a 200 MHz Pentium MMX, 4GB harddrive, and 32 MB of RAM. Both were running Windows 95 and we would often talk about computers and compare. I remember getting some computer games for Christmas one year, Test Drive Offroad and Test Drive 5. While Test Drive Offroad played well, I couldn't play Test Drive 5 because I didn't have the 8MB dedicated video memory necessary to run the game.

I called a family member that worked with computers and he was able to find a graphics card that would work for me on the PCI slot (AGP was cutting edge at this time and didn't have that). It was the Revolution IV by Number Nine with 32MB of dedicated memory. So I saved the $200 or so it cost using birthday money and chores, and I was able to install the game and play it after this upgrade and it was a wondrous thing. Everything, even some other games ran so smooth. My buddy, brought over a new game his computer couldn't run well at all, Driver, and we installed it on mine and when he saw how well it ran he shouted "Man, that is only because of your freakin' graphics card." He took the game back home and kept playing Interstate 76 instead. :D
 
Bought a Voodoo2 to augment my 4mb 2d card. Jump from software to actual 3d was amazing. Quake 1 and Quake 2 was just unbelievably different. Being able to move to 1024x768 was a huge leap forward.

Then my purchase of a Geforce1 with Quake3 was the next huge leap of WOW for me.
 
Going from CGA graphics to 256 color graphics.. bought for kings quest V. Game didn't support CGA. From 4 colors to 256 was very wow. 286-12mhz PC. 1990.

Going from #9GXE64 2D card, 320x240 software rendered quake.. to voodoo1 4meg 640x480 GLQuake! FPS doubled and graphics were much nicer to boot! Pentium 133 machine which was $2599... 15" non-flat CRT. circa 1995.
 
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Firing up Morrowind for the first time on my 8500 Pro was that moment for me for sure, I hadn't played too many 3d games at the time and I remember being a bit awestruck when I first walked off the prisoner ship.
 
At work when it was priced over 10 thousand US dollars was mine (around 30 K for 2 monitors and the video card). And that for a number nine card..

This was in the late 1990s and the resolution was 2048x2560 per 21 inch grayscale monitor.
 
My first true 3D accelerator was a Diamond Viper V330 on the original Nvidia Riva 128. The game that blew me away back then was moto racer. Prior to that it was my Sierra Screamin 3D playing Quake
 
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crazycuz20 said:
My first true 3D accelerator was a Diamond Viper V330 on the original Nvidia Riva 128. The game that blew me away back then was moto racer. Prior to that it was my Sierra Screamin 3D playing Quake
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Yep. That card convinced me to purchase a Voodoo 2.
 
My WoW moments are...

First time:
Doom on a 486. No idea about the graphic card, but seeing the game run smoothly impressed. Before that I thought my SNES stood a chance with a little helping from Mr. Super FX.

Second time:
Unreal on a Voodoo 1 or banshee. I don't know which but it blew me away. Someone I don't know all that well wanted to show me FFVII on the PSX, when I was impressed enough by that he told me he had something even better... and he did. Made me save up for my fist GPU.

Can't recall ever being that impressed since. Graphics improved afterwards, sure, but at a more gradual pace. Going from the PSX to Unreal was the biggest single jump, for me. I imagine many experienced something similar going from the PSX to the PS2, or N64 to NGC.

Forsaken1 said:
Installed Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb and my jaw dropped back in day.Can i go back to 2003?
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I remember really wanting that card, that and it's predecessor... which was so good it went up in price instead of down. But what in the world did you need 128MB ram for? That's, like, a lot.
 
Probably the Geforce 256 for me. Was my 3rd ever gpu purchase, after a Diamond Stealth II (yes, one of those intel cards) and then a Diamond Viper v550. The viper died for some reason, so I was at the local computer shop, and the guy was selling a used creative labs geforce 256 on comission for like $150 or something really cheap. When I opted to buy it, the guy then kept trying to get me to buy an rage 128 or whatever ATi had out then stating "well, it's a brand new card for the same price as the used."

Talk about a leap over the stealth II and the v550. Too bad 2 months after that, GF2 MX came out and beat it for about that same price tag.

I guess 2nd place would've been the origional Radeon. Put my gf2 ultra in its place in alot of newer games of the time.
 
Playing Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II with 3D Acceleration at 1024x768 blew my mind!

EDIT: I believe this was using an ATI Rage 128
 
BIOS flashing an ATI X850 Pro to an X850 XT and then overclocking it. Was like a free upgrade.
 
Mine was when I bought a 3dfx Voodoo 2. That card was insane. More recently my GTX 1080 Ti card really had a "wow" factor.
 
horrorshow said:
Seeing Dungeon Siege for the first time in summer of '02.

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Diablo in 3D??!! (at the time, it was a beautiful game)
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It was a beautiful game, too bad its game play was like a :hungover:, no real replay-ability and game mechanics were too automated
 
Probably when I had a gtx 480 or something, and they launched battlefield with the R9 270s, still wasn't the greatest frames but it was playable. and Yeah still the 980ti/1060 thing, skipped a lot of gens and cards from Nvidia, that was definitely wow, but unbelievable how that looks even dated now.
 
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