What was your 1st 3D video card ?

Matrox G200. Loved that card. The colors were so much better than anything at that time, and you could easily see that.
 
I wasn't able to get a gaming PC until I was working my own jobs in highschool.

I bought a Radeon 9000 pro, when it first released. Although a budget card for the time, it played Max Payne 2 with all the bells and whistles. And it served me well for Morrowind.
 
cold_steel said:
Canopus Pure 3D II (12 meg Voodoo 2) and Quake 2

still one of my fave shooters.
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Hahaha, yep, I purchase a Diamond Monster 3DFX 12 meg card to play Quake 2 as well. Great times.

Hell, I still fire Quake 2 up at times for a trip down memory lane. Funny thing is, it still works perfect even on Windows 10.
 
X850 XT PE in 2005 when I built my first PC. Got it just for HL2 and upgraded to the X1900XTX the following year. I think these cards were the last time ATI/AMD competed with Nvidia at the high end.
 
I am so old that my first monitor was 16 colors ;) but I think it was the EGA wonder. My first game card was the first Voodoo 3dfx card.
 
Matrox G200 paired with (2) Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 cards. Technically, the G200 was 3D but no one I know of actually gamed with it. Not when the Voodoo 2 provided much better FPS.
 
gsilver said:
The first 3D accelerator I ever had was the Voodoo Rush.
I think that came with Turok, which is at least the first 3D accelerated game that I remember.
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Ditto...Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo
Turok was trash, though. Played the crap out of GL Quake.
 
long time ago. pretty sure my first (reasonably enjoyable) "3d" card was ATI 3D Xpression.
Before that, it may have been S3 trio or maybe even the 3d decelerator VIRGE. Ive drank a few beers since then...
 
Kalessian said:
Did the voodoo 1 and 2 cards support openGL and glide? I had one but don't really remember.
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All 3Dfx cards supported Glide - it was a low level rasterization library specially built for 3Dfx hardware. OpenGL support for Voodoo1/Voodoo2 was accomplished through a Glide wrapper - first the so-called miniGL driver optimized for GLQuake and games that used a similar list of OpenGL extensions, then later for an installable client driver (ICD) that supported a broader range of functionality. The miniGL was fast but only reliably worked with Quake and Quake II engine games. The ICD was more generally useful, and came from sources as diverse as 3Dfx, Wicked3D, and the eventual, very functional community MesaFX driver.

My first 3D card was a Matrox Mystique. For the handful of Direct3D games it worked with, it was quite fast by late 1996 standards. Unfortunately, the lack of bilinear filtering, fog support, hardware antialiasing, fogging, and mipmapping hobbled its usefulness for most things. Still, the 2D was fantastic, and it worked great with a Voodoo Graphics board.
 
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Diamond Monster 3d II. I ended up getting a second one and running SLI. Though technically wasn't a video card on its own.

oll-Down-Memory-Lane-Best-3Dfx-Glide-Games-750x430.jpg
 
TheToE! said:
Diamond Monster 3d II. I ended up getting a second one and running SLI. Though technically wasn't a video card on its own.

View attachment 290622
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That last point's weirdly debatable... They never worked for 2D in Windows, but there is an X11 driver that will queue it up to work as a 2D card in *nixland. They'll only run in 16-bit color at the resolutions supported by their framebuffer size, but you could technically do it. I think a guy I knew in college actually ran a server that way for a little while, years and years ago.
 
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First card I bought was a Mystique 220, 4MB, that I put into a Packard Bell desktop. Bought it around the same time I got a 166MHz Pentium MMX "overdrive" chip.

A year or so later I built my first system, with an i740 8MB AGP card and a Voodoo 2.

A couple years later, working at what would eventually become another Gamestop, I bought a bunch of additional Voodoo2 cards on clearance for like $20 each and upgraded the heck out of everything I had.
 
I gamed on a 486 growing up. However, when I could afford my own, I bought a Gefore 3 Ti200. I was playing Half life and the counter strike betas.
 
Matrox Millennium G200 8meg ..paired with a PII 350mhz Slot 1, 128mb PC100, on an ASUS P2B 440BX motherboard .. 8GB IDE HDD running Windows 98. Hosed system a bunch trying to make Tomb Raider run better and having to fix it is what got me into computer repair'ing
 
Halon said:
All 3Dfx cards supported Glide - it was a low level rasterization library specially built for 3Dfx hardware. OpenGL support for Voodoo1/Voodoo2 was accomplished through a Glide wrapper - first the so-called miniGL driver optimized for GLQuake and games that used a similar list of OpenGL extensions, then later for an installable client driver (ICD) that supported a broader range of functionality. The miniGL was fast but only reliably worked with Quake and Quake II engine games. The ICD was more generally useful, and came from sources as diverse as 3Dfx, Wicked3D, and the eventual, very functional community MesaFX driver.
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Thanks. Had no idea about this, my 11 year old self with my monster 3d didn't know what he was doing.
 
Had posted a Matrox Millenium G200 as well but just remembered that it wasn’t the first. ATI Rage on a P90 was the first. Can’t remember what version of Rage it was though.
 
Voodoo Banshee. Stuck a fan on its little heatsink. Come to think of it, that is probably the first "custom" thing I ever did to a computer component!
 
wdtiger said:
Creative 3D Blaster, Rendition V1000. VQuake was rad!
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VQuake was really rad: it replicated the look of software Quake while enhancing it with 16-bit color, texture filtering, and low performance hit edge antialiasing. That it worked on a Rendition V1000 - a card with a fillrate hovering around 25 megapixels - and scaled well down to a low-end Pentium was all the more impressive. Unfortunately it was also pretty technically difficult on the backend, and after some initial enthusiasm John Carmack swore off any more vendor-specific 3D ports. GLQuake was a hacky kludge - it didn't apply overbrighting to lights because no hardware shipping at the time supported it without adding a rendering pass, leaving the game looking washed out, and it didn't replicate some of Quake's visuals accurately. But it did work on a broad range of hardware without a bunch of work needed for specific optimization, and pretty soon it ruled the day. I wish Rendition had managed to squeak out a Windows port of VQuake built on VHexen II's source code, but that's the way things go sometimes.

Also, I feel sorta bad for anyone who bought a Voodoo Rush.

edit: Fixed fillrate from 20
 
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Halon said:
That it worked on a Rendition V1000 - a card with a fillrate hovering around 20 megapixels - and scaled well down to a low-end Pentium was all the more impressive.
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Uh you remember differently than me. V1000 had 25 MP/s fill rate, but since it could not do Z-Buffer, it was essentially halved to 12.5 MP/s. It was semi-fixed for V2000 series, so that's why it was more CPU dependent than the Voodoo. The low end Pentium is a misnomer because at the time of V1000, all we had were 'low end' Pentium's. P55C didn't launch until 1997.
 
dexvx said:
Uh you remember differently than me. V1000 had 25 MP/s fill rate, but since it could not do Z-Buffer, it was essentially halved to 12.5 MP/s. It was semi-fixed for V2000 series, so that's why it was more CPU dependent than the Voodoo. The low end Pentium is a misnomer because at the time of V1000, all we had were 'low end' Pentium's. P55C didn't launch until 1997.
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Gah, I misremembered. My first thought was, "eh, what's 5 megapixels," but in 1996, the answer was, "a lot." My bad.

VQuake got around the z-buffer performance issue by letting the CPU handle it. That wasn't an option for GLQuake, which was a big part of why V1000 performance fell off a cliff trying to run it. I'll also admit to misspeaking about low-end Pentiums; the low end of the market at that point belonged to a mix of still-running 486es and contemporary AMD and Cyrix chips running at double digit MHz counts with cruddy FPUs. Though I guess a socket 4 Pentium or low-end socket 5 chip would also count. Sorry for the confusion, anyway.
 
An Nvidia (STB) Riva 128 4MB that came in my then top-of-the-line Dell Dimension P2-300. I added a 12MB Obsidian Voodoo 2 to it later on. A lot of good memories play X-wing vs Tie Fighter online, Delta Force, G-Police, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 2.
 
An Nvidia (STB) Riva 128 4MB that came in my then top-of-the-line Dell Dimension P2-300. I added a 12MB Obsidian Voodoo 2 to it later on. A lot of good memories play X-wing vs Tie Fighter online, Delta Force, G-Police, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 2.
 
Diamond Viper II .... actually bought it from EB games at the mall. imagine that! you don't see anyone selling PC parts at the mall these days. edit: Electronics Boutique not eb games! 😎
Diamond_Viper2_image_qX4Ti.jpg
 
I had a Voodoo II with a PIII Katmai. After that I ran ATi because Canada kicked ass. Now I run nvidia. sigh.
 
A PCI Savage 3 something something in the hobbled together celeron rig I had. It was a dog of a system.

My first awesomesauce video card was the ATI 9800xt
 
Rendition Verite V1000 - Innograph build, unless you want to count the S3 ViRGE I had before that.
 
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