Biggest video card leap?

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PornoSatan

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I just went from a Radeon HD 4830 to a GeForce GTX 960 , feels great. 4 to 7 times faster in all benchmarks.

What was your biggest leap?
 
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BFGTech GeForce 7800 GS 256 MB OC AGP -> SLI BFGTech GeForce 8800GTX 768MB OC2

Might exceed that jump, IDK... Perspective is probably skewed by my platform jump that I did at the same time (Core 2 QX6700 -> i7-4770). Then again, the above jump went from an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ to an Intel Core 2 QX6700...

EVGA GeForce GTX 570 2.5GB -> SLI EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC
 
Old laptop 9600GT 512mb ---> New laptop GTX765 2gb

In my desktops I replace every other generation give or take so my biggest jump is probably my Riva128 to TNT2 lol
 
4MB Matrox Mystique 220 to 12MB Voodoo 2. My mind was blown.

I'd also gotten used to the 1MB cirrus logic onboard video of another system at the time, and while the Mystique was a step up from that, moving to the Voodoo and using Glide was like being on another world entirely.

Going from a GeForce SDR to a GeForce 3 was also pretty impressive.
 
ATi Rage Pro 8MB to Nvidia Riva TNT2 32MB. The difference was night and day. It would be like going from a Geforce 970 to a card that was 10x faster and a million times less buggy. Seriously, the Rage Pro never rendered anything right.
 
Got all of you beat. GeForce 2 GTS 32MB to Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB. I also jumped from a AMD Thunderbird 1GHZ CPU to a Pentium 4 3GHz at the same time.
 
GeForce 7900m to Radeon HD 7950
or maybe
Geforce 4 Ti 4400 to Geforce 7800 GTX OC (won at a [H]ard|OCP workshop. I miss those days)
 
Since I've been buying video cards roughly once a year, my biggest leap was probabaly when I added a 2nd Voodoo2 for SLI. Or maybe from a Matrox Mystique to Voodoo2, if you can count the Mystique as a "3d" card.

Well, that is until now, I've been sitting on my 290 (non-x) now for about a year and probably won't upgrade until the 390 series come out.
 
NeghVar said:
GeForce 7900m to Radeon HD 7950
or maybe
Geforce 4 Ti 4400 to Geforce 7800 GTX OC (won at a [H]ard|OCP workshop. I miss those days)
Click to expand...

GeForce 7900M to Radeon 7950? So you went from an older gaming laptop to a desktop basically? :p
 
For me I have to chime in and say the first time I set up and ran VOODOO II video card's on my system even using ISA bords and daisy chaining for SLI it was a massive improvement in performance. That was when I was running a 1 mb video card, and dual Voodoo II 12MB video cards on a Pentium 90 if I remember correctly.

baby.. we've come a long way since then! ;) A video card with more memory than my computer had memory and storage combined. Hell my PHONE has more RAM than my entire setup did in memory and storage for my first foray into 3d rendering.

Of course this was on an old sony 15 or maybe 17 inch CRT monitor. I think I had 1200*1000 resolution back then. I think.. may have been lower.
 
Going from no GPU to a 3DFX Voodo. Completely mind blowing, everything has sucked since.
 
pandora's box said:
I also jumped from a AMD Thunderbird 1GHZ CPU to a Pentium 4 3GHz at the same time.
Click to expand...
I don't recall this being that big of an upgrade considering the awful IPC of the P4 netburst... The only thing the 3GHz P4's had going for them was hyperthreading, and while that version of it was also pretty bad it was the first time you could get 2 CPU cores without having a dual socket board, so it was able to multitask a lot better despite the other disadvantages...


OT: The upgrade that felt the largest for me was going from quadfire with 2x HD6970 to a single GTX580, my FPS in most games almost doubled and my system stopped crashing one or two times a day, which was neat.
 
XFX GeForce 6600 GT @ 550 MHz, played Battlefield 2 at 1024x768, medium, 2xMSAA.

to:

XFX GeForce 7900 GT @ 520 MHz, which was 2.5-3x depending on the game and MSAA settings. It made Battlefield 2 look and play like it was supposed to, 1600x1200 highest with 4xMSAA :D

Was the only time I jumped that much in price between generations, and it was a commanding performance increase!

Was the first video card I ever owned that felt like it was built for MSAA :D
 
I went from a P3 @ 750MHz with RIVA TNT2 32MB to a P4 @ 2.4GHz with 9700 Pro AIW

Later, from a 3.2GHz P4 (Prescott = meh) with BFG 7800GS AGP to an Athlon X2 4400 with SLI 8800GTs

Those were both huge leaps for me! Pretty much incremental since the the G92 stuff.
 
im going to guess going from 7600gt to 8800gt.

the ones after were 8800gt to 460gtx
460gtx to 760gtx
760gtx to 970gtx

the 760gtx I regret buying as was only a few months before the 970 got released.
 
Going from an 8600GTS > GTX 260 216 Coress. Then going from a 260 > 660.

Quite proud of my upgrade choices in recent years. They seemed to be the best bang for the buck cards that lasted a long time.
 
I have a few situations where I made a pretty big leap.

My system from about 2003-2007 or so was 2x Intel Xeons, both overclocked on one of the few boards that allowed overclocking and had AGP. I really milked that system for all it was worth, using it for a long time, even into the PCIE era, which of course meant I had to milk as much life out of my AGP card as possible. I was running an X800XT-PE, one of the fastest AGP cards ATI/AMD made not counting niche retro/legacy products. When I finally did upgrade, I upgraded to a 8800GT, my first DX10 card. Of course, I also upgraded to a Q6600 system at that same time.

Eventually I upgraded my videocards to the point that I was running 2x 4870x2 in Quad CF. It worked very well at the time especially in the games I cared about. Being a 4-GPU solution and the fact that it performed so well, I milked that GPU solution for quite a while also. I waited until I could get a single GPU that would outperform all 4 of the 4870 GPUs. That was the GTX680 - so I got two and went SLI for a true leap in performance.
 
Hrmmm... mine would be from some crappy no acceleration card to a Voodoo Banshee.

Then to a Voodoo 3-3500

Then to a Voodoo 5-5500

All of those were quite big jumps.

There were some big jumps after that as well.. Geforce 2, 3, etc.

Then the next biggest jump was from an ATI HD 3870 to a 4850 - double the speed, oh yeah.

Then to dual 6870s that I was given as RMA replacements for a couple of 4870x2 cards, one of which was DOA.

Then to dual 7970s.. so, so, so much faster.
 
geforce 280 to amd 7970 and the vram increase of 1 to 3 gigs was pretty much needed
 
I would have to say from a BFG 260 GTX SLI to PNY 680 GTX SLI. I was amazed by how much of a graphical improvement this made for my gaming needs at that upgrade time.
 
Went from a TNT2 to Radeon 9800 Pro when I got back into PC gaming, massive jump.
 
In absolute terms, every upgrade most of us make probably constitutes a numerically greater increase in processing power vs. the last upgrade, unless you upgrade your video card every two or three months.

In terms of the apparent difference it made to games at the time, basically nothing will ever beat the shift from CPU generated graphics to 3D accelerators (they weren't called GPUs then). In my case, this was from something like a 1MB 2D-only PCI card, made by "Number 9," to an ATI Rage Pro Turbo.

The difference was mind blowing. The next upgrade I made was from that ATI Rage Pro to a GeForce 256, and while that was definitely a huge upgrade, it didn't have the same obvious impact that going to a 3D accelerator that could perform texture filtering did.
 
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