What is the worst and best video card you ever owned?

Best:

Diamond Viper V330 (Riva 128). Was my first 3D card and got me into PC gaming.


Worst:

Diamond Viper V330. My PC only supported the pci version when the agp version was like twice as fast. Also FF7 wouldn't run hardware accelerated, even a patch didn't fix this for me.
 
I would like to chime in for a friend as well. The best card he ever owned was the GeForce 3 (that my shitty Gefore 4 MX couldn't best) which lasted him from what seemed like the second Thief game up through Doom 3 and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. The worst was the Geforce 5200 he replaced it with, which gave him at best a 2 fps boost in Doom 3. It couldn't even run Source games to their potential, since Valve disabled DirectX 9 on those horrible cards.
 
Worst: Possibly the GeForce3 Ti500. It wasn't really a bad card, but 2 months later, the Ti4200 beat it for half the price. Another really bad card was the Gigabyte 8800GT, extremely noisy cooler and the thing ran just as hot as a regular, single-slot 8800GT

Best: Radeon 9700 Pro - it was so far ahead of the competition it felt like you were in a science fiction movie :eek:
 
Worst card I ever owned was an ATI x 700, only card to ever go bad on me, only took a year too.
 
Going from an X1950 XTX to a 8800 GTS OC under the belief that DirectX 10 would make a difference. I think the 8800 GTS OC costed me about $300.00 to upgrade to. In reality, I received nearly no benefit in fps over the equally expensive X1950 XTX except being able to play games in DX10 mode which only a few games supported at the time and caused the frame-rates to take a nose dive. I mostly ended up playing in Direct x9 mode which felt like they ran slower. Therefore, it was a loss imo. I really should not have bought into the DX10 hype train. It is nice to see that DX11 is doing at least a little bit better in terms of adoption, etc.
 
The worst card I have ever owned is the gtx460. I wonder why that is >.>
 
best:
rendition v2100. fantastic visuals and a great community.

worst:
ati rage 128. had driver problems with the card the entire time I owned it.

sentimental favorite:
original 3dfx voodoo card. first 3d card I owned, totally mind blowing to go from software rendering to opengl and glide.

card that made me lose hair:
9600gt. card had the '...has stopped responding.' problem. it would happen about once a week but always at the absolute worst possible time.
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GushpinBob said:
I was wondering why it took so long for someone to mention any Intel gpu.
Click to expand...

Only good Intel 3D card I can remember was the i740. Intel limited them to 4mb back then, but Real3D had a modified 12mb version. For the time, that ran quake2 as well as my TnT2Ultra did.

It was awesome because at the time, that Intel was the only card that could run FF7 in hardware mode. This was before the nvidia mod came out.
 
Best?

8800 GTS 512 G92

Worst?

Can't say I ever had a card that was in the category of "worst." If I had to place one in a meh category. I would go with the 7900 GT SLI setup. Performance was good, but I had some issues with it here and there. The 8800 GTS 512 G92 made it cry and when I upgraded.
 
I'm with xBanzai, the best card I've had is the EVGA 8800 GTS 512 G92, the worst was the 7900 GT series ( I had two of them go bad). I still have an EVGA 6800u for a backup card, it has been a really good card too.
 
ati 9500 soft mod (love that card) for the price it was just like 9800 pro.. best card ever

my worst would be my nvidia MSI N9600GSO i got 2 of them and put them in sli and dang they sucked bad.. had nothing but problem after problem. never been back to nvidia since.. amd ati all the way since.
 
I forgot to add these:

Worst: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro: The piece of shit card would just crash and lockup everytime I would update the driver. Had to RMA it and thankfully I got a 9600 XT instead which worked flawlessly.

ASUS ATI Radeon 1650: Similar to the card above, everytime I used a newer drive games would instantly crash, but no lockup or freezing.

Gigabyte 275 GTX: This stupid card would sometimes lose video signal when I booted into Windows using the DVI port, however if you use HDMI or VGA it would work fine, this card was confirmed by Gigabyte that this flaw was plaguing every Gigabyte 275 GTX.

And the best cards I've owned is my trusty Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 8800 640MB GTS and Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870X2. Miss those cards.
 
Don't know that I've ever owned a truly awful graphics card but the Gainward NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS AGP is the only contender I can think of, purely because I bought it at a time when ATI had released DX9 cards that supported HDR lighting + AA and that was where that card faltered in Oblivion as it could only do one or the other. Second would be the GeForce 5900 XT, a card that had woeful SM 2.0 performance.

The best card I've owned so far is the EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280, although now I have a Point of View NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 in my system I've a feeling that will soon replace it as I've been very impressed with it in the three weeks I've owned it.

If there was a vote for most disappointing card then Sapphire ATI RADEON HD 5870 Vapor-X CrossFireX would be my choice. Not that there was anything wrong with the single cards themselves, it was more a case of being frustrated by ATI/AMD's lack of interest in supporting CrossFireX really such that I regret the day I decided to buy a second card. IMO, their CFX drivers are underwhelming, awful even. I honestly feel like I've endured seven months of beta testing trying to get games running properly with two cards (most of them being multiformat titles). As such it spoilt my enjoyment of them as I spent less time playing them and more time getting them to work. Perhaps an exaggeration but it sure felt like it! Switching back to a single card was the best decision I ever made. I will NOT be using multi-GPU setups ever again, I can tell you!
 
Best - Tie
Voodoo 1 - going from software to hardware in glQuake was just so massively huge it really makes the general incremental changes between 3D accellerators over the years pale
8800GTS - bought it on day 1 and used it longer than any other video card I have ever had and when I upgrade it was still a viable card!

Worst - Tie
S3 anything - they ALWAYS sucked
GeForce4 440MX - what a lame card that was to have the GeForce 4 name
 
Best was my PNY 6800GT and though it had to be RMA'd I went the longest with it of all my cards, four years, before an upgrade. Very powerful for a single slot card.

I never really had a bad card as I was careful when upgrading. I'd say the weakest was probably the original Radeon 8500, it was over priced at $300.
 
I feel sorry for the suckers that bought any of Geforce 5 series or anything with an MX behind it. Nvidia really raped their customers with their hyped up marketing scheme.
 
Best:
Diamond Monster 3D:First 3D card. I loved it. It opened up a new world to me
ATI 9800 non-Pro. DX9 and quiet, Did wonders for my gaming. Made Halo look awesome
ATI 5450: Best HTPC card I ever purchased

Worst:
ATI X800GT : Loud, slow. 'Nuff said.
Asus GeForce 4 4400: Not a bad card, just hope for more. Replaced it with the 9800 non-Pro
 
Best: VisionTek GeForce 3. Had it the day it launched and hollllyyy shit was it fast.

Also, I'll throw a nod to my MSI X1800XT ATI card. Ran like a champ from 2005 to 2008, played everything I threw at it.

And it's too early to say, but my EVGA GTX580s in SLI are amazing right now.

Worst: S3 Savage2000 board. Drivers were fucking garbage.
 
Best: EVGA 6800GS 256MB, single slot, not too power hungry, BF2 became playable.

Worst: Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Vérité V2100), still can't believe I paid money for this card. Bad drivers (um, no drivers), bad picture quality, died. Only card ever to completely die on me.

Honorable Mentions: Abit Ti4200 64MB AGP-4X, BFG 8800GTS-512
 
Worst: FX5900XT hot, slow, loud, falsely advertised as being dx9 piece of crap that had to be RMA'd once.

Best: 9800PRO played everything for years until games starting requiring dx9 SM3.0.
 
Going to include the cards I had when it was my dads computer.

Dads computer :

Best : ATI VGA wonder 512kb (ISA)- slowish and oldish even in a 486, but it ran stably when every other time we tried to get a graphics card for the p1 90mhz, would crash either in dos mode or windows mode, so had to fall back to it. (POS Cyris Logic and trident junk)

Worst : Whatever stupid random card he was trying to get when he build his p1 90mhz system, cards either chain crashed in stuff like civ 1, so he sent it back, or else it would crash in windows 3.11

Personal

Best : Current ATI hd5870, runs cool, runs what I want, just some minor driver hiccups.
Worst : ATI Rage 128. The chip died, and would not render in 3d, took working with microsoft tech support to figure out why, when Mech Commander 2 would not run.
 
Best tie between 7800GTX512 and 5870, never any problems with either, both quiet too.
Worst: 3870X2 man what a piece of crap, alot of CF problems, very hot, loud
 
My worst is an easy choice: my first real 3D card.

Hercules Thriller 3D 4MB (Rendition v2200)

My first real 3D card, but it brought with it a ton of issues that you just don't see today:

1. The VGA core was dog-slow, so playing any VGA-mode DOS games was painful. They made a hack utility specifically for this card to map VGA to SVGA modes to get around the performance problem, but this meant the game was either letterboxed, or it didn't work at all because it used Mode X.

2. The card was a poorly-designed PCI busmaster, so anytime you used it with anything heavy in 2D, it caused crackling in sound. This includes just scrolling through a webpage, or moving your mouse cursor around the screen really fast. I've never owned another card with this problem.

3. The card was "officially" faster than the 3DFX Voodoo Graphics, and was especially good on lower-end CPUs because it had a full triangle setup engine. But it was beaten in newer games because the triangle setup hardware was limiting the rest of the video pipeline. Unfortunately, the drivers would not recognize cases where the CPU could do the triangle setup faster, and there was no way to manually disable the triangle setup except in RRedline-native ports, so the card didn't perform up-to-par.

4. The windows desktop experience always sucked because the card would have corrupted mouse cursors and icons. It sounds like a minor detail, but it was very annoying.

5. Just one more thing: per-polygon mipmapping. You people haven't seen pain until you've seen entire textures pop in-and-out as their mipmap levels change. It's bad enough with per-pixel mipmapping to have those solid lines where the mipmap levels cross, but that''s heaven compared to per-polygon mipmapping, where polygons change resolution almost randomly.

My best card?

I'd say it's my GTX 460 1GB. It's been a decade since I owned such a quiet stock card, and although I have had a few driver issues, they've been no worse than any of my other modern cards.
 
6800LE(Limited edition), was basically an Ultra that only evga put out which had the same PCB as the ultra, same memory speeds, just the core came a bit lower stock.
only time I ever paid like 300+ for a video card.
will never do that again though
 
Worst: Tough call, but my HD2900XT didn't 'wow' like I'd hoped
Best: my 4GB HD5970 is up there, along with the ATI 9800XT and X1900XT from a few years ago.
Honorable Mention: VIC II in the my old C64 - as a kid having 8 sprites moving around the screen in BASIC code (peek/poke anyone?) was really cool! And then when I worked out how to use the raster interrupt...
 
Worst?.....Hmmm....Maybe the ATI Rage 128. For some reason, I remember having driver problems. And, since others state the same thing, I believe my recollection is accurate.

Best? It's a toss up between my former Voodoo 3 and 6600 GT. I'd 6600 GT since I played on that thing till the fan stopped working (3-4 years).
 
I had a MSI 9600GT that I thought was outstanding. It maxed out every game on my old 17" monitor for a while then when I upgraded to this 22", it still gave me playable framerates on every game I fed into it and I only had to lower a few settings. Not shabby at all for a mid range card that only cost like $100 in its hay day.
 
Best: BFGTech GeForce 8600GT. Bought this well before BFG bit the dust. Has been rock solid and still plays older games well.

Worst: Some S3 piece of crap--my first AGP card--Savage4, I think?. Computer would crash with some games, and frequently there would be texture corruption, white lines, etc. Threw it in the trash.
 
worst card I've ever owned: ATI Rage Fury MAXX. Even with 2 GPU's on it, it was a piece of crap....

best card? ATI 9700 Pro AGP.
 
Worst: 9800 Pro (two in a row that were defective)
Best: 8800GT (so much bang for buck, and my last single slot video card)

Bonus:
Most Memorable: Voodoo 3 3500 (introduced me to 3D acceleration and will therefore always hold a special place in my mind)
 
worst: radeon X850XT & 5870 Crossfire
Best: 8800GT SLI, single 5870

yep even now im having probs with my 5870 crossfire, bad drivers are bad.
 
Best - Sapphire HD 2900PRO. This card was a crazy upgrade from a 7300GS!
Worst - 6200SE worst card I ever had.
 
Worst: DOA 6800GS with some problem preventing the blue color channel from working. Bought it right before leaving the country, so was stuck with it for half a year.
Best: 8800GS. With no demanding games in sight, it's lasted far longer than it should have.
 
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