What was the very first video card you ever bought?

I've been given a few by family/friends during the '90s, but the first video card I bought by myself was a ATi Radeon 9800 Pro from CompUSA (rebate took 2 years to arrive, but it did come).
 
The first one:
PC Mag

Mediavision Thunder & Lightning

Purchased at a steep discount from a dusty Computer Shopper magazine. I recall being stuck with that card for far too many years. ISA SVGA. Very, very slow.

The first *good* video card that I bought was a Voodoo Rush. I remember wanting to play UltraHLE sooo much, since I couldn't afford an N64, so this was the shortcut to it.
Plus the other 3D games.

Though the Voodoo Rush was kinda crappy and limited, so it didn't last long.
 
First card I bought was a Voodoo Banshee -- I remember seeing Quake on a Voodoo 2 at a LAN shop, and previous to that I had only ever seen software rendered games -- it blew me away. I bought that Banshee quickly after that, and then Unreal (the original). Good times. That would have been on my PII 266, or possibly I had upgraded to the PIII 550 by then, not sure.
 
Diamond Stealth 64 with 4mb of DRAM (the VRAM version was like 2x the cost) with vesa local bus interface. It was about 20 years ago.
 
If memory serves, first card I bought was an ISA Tseng Labs ET4000.
Still have it (and an ET6000) here in the closet, together with a Canopus Pure3D, Pure3D II and Spectra2500 :)

et4000.jpg
 
Diamond Viper II with the S3 Savage 2000 GPU. Yes yes it was S3 but my game at the time was UT99 and the S3TC with high res texture pack was amazing.
 
WhoBeDaPlaya said:
If memory serves, first card I bought was an ISA Tseng Labs ET4000.
Still have it (and an ET6000) here in the closet, together with a Canopus Pure3D, Pure3D II and Spectra2500 :)

et4000.jpg
Click to expand...

Enjoyed that picture. And the Canopus Pure 3D with it's double texture memory at 4MB. I was quite jealous with only my Diamond Monster 3D. I like you.
 
First card I purchased myself was a Diamond Viper V330 4MB (NVIDIA Riva 128)
 
So far back i can barely remember, My first PC (286 12Mhz) came with an MDA ISA card, i had to change it to a CGA ISA card i got so i could plug my TV-PC converter in. Had an ELSA EGA card lying around but no monitor, then moved up to a Cirrus Logic 5429 VLBus VGA adaptor, so many colours!!!!

First 3D card would have been the original PowerVR Addon, followed by the ATI Rage Magnum(bought a TNT2 Ultra soon afterwards).....

I miss the days when a top end card was £150
 
Trident 1mb VLB card. Card was sexy as hell in that 486 dx2-66mhz. Had scsi on my first pc also. Was able to run things that required a pentium because the scsi interface took so much load off the rest of the system.
 
My first graphics card was so bitchin fast back in the day!!!! Brings a tear to my eye...
k9uR0fU.jpg

Crap someone already posted this earlier :( Anyway my first dedicated 3D graphics card was the Orchid Righteous 3D coupled with a Matrox Millennium.
 
Last edited:
My first "3D" graphics card was an S3 Virge 6mb, so I could play the EQ beta. It was an add-on card, and was one of the first in the area, which means I had huge balls. From there, I've owned just about every card from both camps released. Unless they REALLY sucked. You know, read the [H] reviews and buy it =P

We had a class in 98~ that was Electro Digital Technologies, so when google and crap was actually legit. I was 16, and in the gaming prime! CS beta, all that jazz.

Back when we used serial to have a LAN party hahaha, and token ring.
 
Matrox Mystique (maybe 2MB) plus the Rainbow Runner add in daughter card. I actually cleaned up some old CDs yesterday and ran across the disks that came with it. I also did the Voodoo 2 Single Line Interscaling (the first "SLI" cards) with 2x 12 MB cards. Super fun setup back then.
 
I think S3 Virges qualified as 3D _de_celerators ;)
And I state this having used a ton of them (DX, GX, etc.) back in the day.
 
The first PC came with a video card was Trident 9000C, E-ISA with 512kB V-RAM

The first standalone card I bought was Matrox Mystique G100 with 4MB V-RAM. I was a big Matrox fan back then in the 90's. This thing although has 3D acceleration, doesn't even do Alpha-blending. I was dreaming to have a card that can alpha-blend almost everyday. Sigh the old days (although I was only a teenager back then)

Then comes the Matrox G400, me and my friend both bought one. We were completely blown away by the Environment Bump Mapping demo.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top