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What Is Your Personal Favorite Video Card of All Time?

My Radeon RX480 8gb gave me years of good service at 1080p, only upgrades xmas 2023 (18mth) as I was not prepared to pay the mining/covid premium. Its still doing service in another rig now.
 
Revenant_Knight said:
Out of all the video cards you've owned and used, which is your favorite? Which one hits you in the feels?


Favorite: 980TI. I played and replayed more games then any other time in my life thanks to this card. Powerful, inexpensive, and still able to hold its own in 1080P.


Runner up: Voodoo 2. The card, the myth, the legend. The first time I played Unreal Tournament on Voodoo 2 SLi was life altering.
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ATI 9700 Pro and 8800gt, hands down. Third place is Geforce 2 GTX, and 4th is the original Voodoo card that kicked this whole thing off.
 
The Voodoo3 is my favorite video card ever. When I first used it, it was in my Dad's PC, which was a PII-233 computer. I was used to playing Quake 2 at 400x300 with software rendering. Seeing it at 800x600 with OpenGL was a jaw-dropping moment for me. Not only that, but seeing how well other games ran, like Need for Speed High Stakes and Test Drive 4 was just unbelievable for me.

My runner-up video card would be the GeForce 6600GT. Seeing Doom 3 run on that card was a dream for me, as I had a crappy card before that which made the game run at a horrendous frame rate.
 
I still like my old Matrox Millennium I. It was the last card I bought before the 3D era. Since then no card or SLI setup has ever been as fast as I'd like, including the 3090 I bought in December 2020. I'm going to buy a 5090 or 5080, but I'm sure I'll wish it was faster after I get it.
 
GeForce 3 Ti 200, got it as a gift when I was a broke freshman and used it more than any card I had. Tweaking Unreal 2 for 32 fps on my 17" CRT was a joy..was heartbroken when it died in 2005 after 3 years of faithful service to he replaced by a barely faster 5700LE..
 
undertaker2k8 said:
GeForce 3 Ti 200, got it as a gift when I was a broke freshman and used it more than any card I had. Tweaking Unreal 2 for 32 fps on my 17" CRT was a joy..was heartbroken when it died in 2005 after 3 years of faithful service to he replaced by a barely faster 5700LE..
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Geforce 3 Ti 200 is my #2 favorite of all time, I had mine for much much longer than it should have ever lasted. I think I begrudgingly replaced it when I was forced to upgrade to DX9 for BattleField 2 but even then I kept it in a box for almost 15 years. That's how much of an impact it had
 
I've already said #1 was the original Voodoo card. GLQuake and Quake2 were incredible for the day. Voodoo2 was good but only incrementally better unless you went SLI for 1024x768 (too rich for my blood back then). I had a Voodoo3 3000 for many years and it was solid. Voodoo5 5500 was great right up to the point where 3DFX sold out. Switched to a Geforce 3 Ti-200 and used that for a long time. Then a Geforce 5800 which wasn't great. 8800GTS was pretty good. 660ti after that, finally we are in the HD resolutions. Then 970, first 1080p card. Then a huge jump to 1080ti. 1080ti was the first card since the Voodoo3 where I was like "WOW". Those were on my main rig, there were a variety of sub-par bargain cards on my other systems.... ATI Rage 128, MX440, maybe a 950 in there somewhere. My server is running on a GT610 or 620 I think, but that sees zero gaming.
 
Voodoo was great but the passthrough degraded 2D too much for me (I was running 1600x1200 at 100Hz then).
 
cpufrost said:
Voodoo was great but the passthrough degraded 2D too much for me (I was running 1600x1200 at 100Hz then).
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Although it wasn't common, if you had two monitor inputs (say a DSUB->BNC for 2D, and another DSUB for 3dfx card), you could use that to avoid the passthrough degradation, I had this for a while with my first setup, Matrox Mystique with a Canopus Voodoo 1.

I've had a lot of different video cards over the years but my favorite might be my Geforce GTX 970 (EVGA SSC) that got me through a lot of games during a rough patch(Tomb Raider 2013, Dragon Age Inquisition, SF4, DmC, and later parts of Divinity Original Sin 2 and Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It did a lot of solid 1080p and even some 1440p gaming despite the whole 3.5GB of memory controversy (which I got a $30 check for!)

DOS2 and TR:SotTR is what pushed me to upgrade to a 980Ti as I really wanted to play those in 1440p. The 980Ti later died and was brought back by RazorWind (see https://hardforum.com/threads/graphics-card-autopsy-msi-980-ti-golden-edition.1993063/) and saw me through the completion of SotTR before going down for the count again.
 
Voodoo2
GeForce4 Ti 4200

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reaper12 said:
Your memories of the card are a lot different than mine. I thought it was a bang average card that barely moved the needle in terms of price/performance.
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Yep, just a midrange card and nothing special.
 
8800 GT, my friend has 8800 GTS in SLI with 384 mb of vram, totally choked in crysis. Ran decently on my GPU on low settings. Also, 250 bucks for an experience well beyond the ps3 and xbox 360. Playing Oblivion on that card vs. my 360 was night and day
 
I've posted it before, but my favorite will always be the 9800xt. It wasn't my first, and obviously not my last, but it was the first time I bought the absolute best-of-the-best available at that time. Couple that with the fact that it came along with other new system parts and was replacing an S3 Savage 32mb PCI card (gross), it blew my mind.
 
At one point, I would have said the Radeon HD 5870 would have been my favorite GPU of all time. First DX11 GPU and it caught Nvidia completely off guard. It was uncontested for 6 months until Nvidia released “Fermi” which turned out to be the GPU griddle because of how hot and power hungry it was.

As of right now, though, it is now the RTX 4090. It’s been on the market for 4 years and is still the 2nd fastest consumer GPU money can buy. Bought it for $1600 on launch day. Never would have imagined a $1600 GPU being a value proposition and long-term investment, but here we are.
 
Probably the Matrox Millenium 4MB I had back in the 1990s. Vid cards became a pain in the ass once 3D acceleration hit, and they're still a pain in the ass.

If you're talking GPUs, that's tougher. Probably the GTX 680 4GB cards I bought to run a surround setup. Those lasted me a long time. After a while I just mostly quit using surround. The extra vram on the 4GB model made them run about like a 1050 or 1050Ti, somewhere around there, so they stayed usable for quite a while.
 
Putting things into perspective, I'm definitely thinking the 4090's right there. It's rapidly approaching 4 years old and it's still the 2nd best card available. It still runs everything I throw at it the way I want those games to run, too. It wasn't cheap, but it has been a hell of a value.
 
The RTX 4090 I bought in early 2023 from Best Buy for $1,540 ($1,600 MSRP minus 10% coupon). It was my first flagship GPU, then I sold it in early 2025 for $2,000, which covered the cost of my RTX 5090. I expect the 5090 will run AAA titles at 4k resolution for another five-six years. So, the $1,540 I spent in 2023 will have kept me at or near the top-of-the-line GPU for nearly a decade. That's an outstanding value.

Edit: knock on wood my 5090 lasts that long!
 
I am with the newer club too.

I have fond memories of some of my GPU's, but my fave is always the replacement.

I was gifted a 5080 Vulcan OC, so that is my fave, when before it was my 4070Ti :D

I even thought my 3070Ti was awesome lol..
 
The Vega 56 has remained the most memorable to me because it offered “Stage by Stage” overclocking (7), and the HBM2 timings could also be adjusted, so its performance was outstanding for the price.
 
Matrox G400. Had a SODIMM slot on it to upgrade the RAM (which I did), a RAMDAC so amazing it made even a shitty monitor look amazing, "DualHead" support to run 2 monitors simultaneously on Win98 and newer, good Direct3D support. I even had the Motion-JPEG hardware expansion board for it. Coupled it with a 3DFX Voodoo card at the time. Still my GOAT.
 
I def had 2 main ones..

My first ever card for my first built system I paid for, ATI All-in-Wonder 128MB AGP, and then my 2nd card i got, first time buying a high end card, Gainward Geforce Ti4600 Ultra!
 
Domingo said:
Putting things into perspective, I'm definitely thinking the 4090's right there. It's rapidly approaching 4 years old and it's still the 2nd best card available. It still runs everything I throw at it the way I want those games to run, too. It wasn't cheap, but it has been a hell of a value.
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I'd probably be voting for the 4090 too if I'd bought one. Or a 1080Ti. Probably the 1080Ti if I'd bought both. I still think the 1080Ti is the GOAT, but I never had one so I just can't bring myself to call it my personal favorite. That has to be a card I've owned.

Hmm... I should probably add the Intel ARC B580 to my favorites list. It's cheap and fun to mess with. Got mine on launch day for $270. Microcenter let me order it for pickup. Gaming? Not so much, got a 5090 and a 3090 for that. More like screwing around seeing what the cheap new(ish) weird thing from Intel can do. Next up is testing the B580 at 6144x2560 on my new work screen, just to see what happens. I guess a big part of it is I'm not afraid to beat the hell out of this card. I could get a replacement for $310. Flog the 5090? Oh hell no. I like my games and a replacement is $5k. Realistically I wouldn't replace the B580 with another one if it died. I'd get something else to play with. Probably an AMD card.
 
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