What was your 1st 3D video card ?

Voodoo 3 2000 my dad bought me so I could play Falcon 4.0. Trouble was we had a Mac at the time. They sold models with Mac vBIOSs but he bought the PC version so he figured out how to flash it with the Mac vBIOS and we got it working.

This man, to this day, still can't figure out when you need to single click or double click.

Also i'm fairly certain I've posted this exact thing in this thread before but it just popped up on New Posts and I can't be bothered to search.
 
pretty sure my first card was one of the first 3d-decellerators - S3 trio64 or virge. Ive drank many beers since then. cant remember clearly. Then iterated through a bunch of the ATI Mach/Rage cards.
 
Did I already post in here?....oh well! The first card which I bought for my own computer around 15 years old, was an 64mb ATI Radeon 9000 pro. It was a great little card which played anything I wanted with great image quality and settings.
 
First dedicated card was probably an s3 virge, I probably still have it somewhere. Then I upgraded to an Intel 440BX system with a Slot 1 Celereon at 333, until I got a slot key adapter to add a coppermine P3 at 1 GHz, then that system was screaming! I then added an ATI Radeon 9600 I think, or an nVidia 6200 that I unlocked into a 6600, but it was so long ago I don't remember for sure. That could have been when I jumped to socket A with the goldfinger/trace pin mods.

Edit:
I remember using the heat sink off of the ATI 9600 on one of the chipsets on a DFI CFX3200 for sits' and giggles, since it was an ATI chipset. I used it where the black heatsink was, until I got a second DFI egg heatsink and did double those for more insanity. Wonder if I can find any of the old pictures anymore :LOL:
 
voodoo 2, had a rage ii before that, but I am not sure that counts. The performance in tomb raider was less than aspiring
 
RS_Surge said:
GPU's with no fan support was hip back in the day. I think the G200 was the hottest GPU i've ever had.
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I had a PCI Voodoo Banshee and it died early due to no heatsink and poor case airflow. Replaced it with some SiS abomination (6326 IIRC) which was used up until a friend gave me his old Voodoo 3.
 
TNT2, still have it sitting in a box in the shed. Also had an ATI All in wonder 128 Pro around the same time and a little later tried out a Voodoo 3 2000. Looking back I'm not even sure how I could afford it, I was in high school at the time. I spent a lot of time building, overclocking, etc back in those days. I even made my own water cooling setup with a home made water block.....worked pretty good!
 
Well, the first 3D accelerator I used was the one in my Compaq Presario 5204. It was a built-in ATI RAGE LT PRO, at AGP 2x speeds. Before that, my 486 only had a TVGA card that wasn't really doing 3D acceleration at all. The motherboard didn't have an AGP slot, unfortunately, so when I started finding games that I couldn't run on the integrated graphics, my only option was a PCI slot graphics card. Not PCI-E, just plain PCI... yeah. I can't remember the exact model, but I think it was a Diamond Stealth Radeon of some kind. I believe it was 9250 because when I look around at cards, that's the one that feels right. The boxes on eBay for those cards says those require a Pentium III and I only had a 350MHz K6-2, though, and I remember the card working (though still kinda slowly, it was more functional than the built-in graphics). So I don't know if that means I remember wrong or Pentium III was just the recommendation. I also remember carrying that PCI Radeon to my Athlon XP at first, and being blown away by the improved performance in games just from a faster CPU... then being blown away again when I got an actual AGP card like a GeForce 6600. What's hilarious is that when my next computer didn't have AGP, I looked at the motherboard and saw PCI-E and thought, "Oh no, I'm going to be stuck with crappy, slow PCI again just like before," and then was surprised it was faster.

But yeah, depending on what you count, it was either the built-in RAGE LT PRO, or a plain old PCI Radeon card used as an upgrade path on a machine that had neither AGP nor PCI-E.
 
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My first personal system, and not one I shared with my older brother, had a ATI Rage Fury Max. Ohh the good ol' days =P.
 
first gpu was actually SLI Voodoo 2 Banshees they were amazing for the time not performance lol bragging i ended up giving 1 to my friend so we could game.
 
The Cirrus-Logic 1MB SVGA card that came inside the assembled AMD 5x86-based system I bought from a local Vietnamese computer dealership in the suburbs of Boston (later shut-down because they use to pirate all the MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 installations that came on their machines). It was so powerful it could play Quake 1 (which had just been released) at 10 FPS at 320 X 200.

Edited: OKay, I just realized that the Cirrus-Logic wasn't a 3D accelerator card so the first one I owned that was was the Stealth II with the Rendition Verite 2100 chipset. It played the special edition version of Quake designed for that chipset at +25 FPS, I think. Surprisingly it had full screen anti-aliasing at that framerate when even the Voodoo couldn't do that (?)
 
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I think i had a voodoo or TNT2. I can not remember it's been so long ago.. just remember it was during the late 90s and I was running Quake 1 and 2 around that time.
 
Jack Of Owls said:
The Cirrus-Logic 1MB SVGA card that came inside the assembled AMD 5x86-based system I bought from a local Vietnamese computer dealership in the suburbs of Boston (later shut-down because they use to pirate all the MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 installations that came on their machines). It was so powerful it could play Quake 1 (which had just been released) at 10 FPS at 320 X 200.

Edited: OKay, I just realized that the Cirrus-Logic wasn't a 3D accelerator card so the first one I owned that was was the Stealth II with the Rendition Verite 2100 chipset. It played the special edition version of Quake designed for that chipset at +25 FPS, I think. Surprisingly it had full screen anti-aliasing at that framerate when even the Voodoo couldn't do that (?)
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To be fair that Cirrus Logic card wasn't bad, but it was beholden to the CPU in that machine for Quake. The 5x86 was a solid high-clocked 486, but even at 160 MHz with a 3Dfx Voodoo board it would have been hard pressed to deliver a reliably good experience.

The v2100 was a decent chip, and VQuake was the best of all worlds in terms of running Quake in 1997. 16-bit color, edge antialiasing, SVGA resolutions, and accurate reproduction of software rendering features like overbrighting for lights made it a cut above GLQuake for everything but raw performance on faster hardware. I wish like hell Rendition had stuck around.
 
Halon said:
To be fair that Cirrus Logic card wasn't bad, but it was beholden to the CPU in that machine for Quake. The 5x86 was a solid high-clocked 486, but even at 160 MHz with a 3Dfx Voodoo board it would have been hard pressed to deliver a reliably good experience.

The v2100 was a decent chip, and VQuake was the best of all worlds in terms of running Quake in 1997. 16-bit color, edge antialiasing, SVGA resolutions, and accurate reproduction of software rendering features like overbrighting for lights made it a cut above GLQuake for everything but raw performance on faster hardware. I wish like hell Rendition had stuck around.
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Yeah, imagine my surprise when I could play Shadow Warrior for MS-DOS (which had also just come out) at 800 X 600, I think, on my Cirrus-logic board at about 20-25 FPS after I had upgraded my system to a true Intel Pentium running at 166MHz. It could brute force a game that I previously could never play at playable framerates at SVGA using the 5x86. It's still amusing to me though that any game I played at 25 FPS back then (ie Quake II when I got my Stealth II) I considered blazing fast. Now if I play any game and it dips below 60 FPS even for only a few seconds I get a frowny, pouty face lol.
 
3dfx Voodoo 1, currently safely boxed in my parents' basement. Keep it for nostalgia purposes.

Have a Canopus Voodoo 2 down there too. Damn, I loved that card.
 
Ati rage pro PCI sometime in 97, replaced by a PCI voodoo banshee fairly quickly.
Stuck with pci cards for a while because I was a big fan of multimonitor setups. Got win98 on release day so I could do multimon.
 
ATi 3D Rage Pro (Xpert@Play). All my friends at the time bought NVidia Riva 128’s, but I liked ATi (my previous card was a PCI Mach64), it had twice the memory (8MB vs 4MB) and TV out. What a bad decision! The Riva wiped the floor with it and ATi’s drivers were terrible, not to mention that it took forever for them to support OpenGL. Didn’t buy another ATi card until the 9800 Pro!

I don’t remember what the first 3D game that I played on it was, but I distinctly remember the final boss fight of Unreal being a slideshow on it. The same for pretty much all of Quake II, when it wasn’t crashing!
 
STB Blackmagic 3D 12MB - Voodoo 2. But I think the Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro GeForce DDR was more memorable for me.
 
Nvidia Riva TNT was the first one I had and it came in a gateway PC. This was back in '98 or '99 and I was also just discovering access to videos & FTPs. . . so I wanted a card that could output to my TV. As a result, the first GPU I actually purchased on its own was an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro (AGP). Loved that card.
 
My first 3D card was the TNT (Creative Graphics Blaster CT6710). Don't recall what the first game to use it was - probably something running on the original Quake engine.
 
Creative Labs Voodoo Banshee PCI was my first 3D card. It died after a few years of use, but I bought another a few years ago. It resides in the same Compaq Presario 9232 that I had the original card in. Works great for Win95/DOS gaming.
 
Diamond Edge back in 1995. Major fail but it was a neat concept.
Didn't really mess around again with 3D even though some cards had rudimentary at best 3D support (S3 Virge).
First real 3D for gaming was Voodoo (another Diamond card) but I sold it because I couldn't deal with the blurry output to my Hitachi 21" CRT at 1600x1200 at 85Hz.
Tomb Raider, Monster Truck Madness, et-al were fun to play on a (then) high end Pentium 200 system.
Some other cards I remember like the Matrox M3D PCI based add on card bundled with Ultim@te Race Pro. That made me go out and buy an expensive Thrustmaster steering wheel and pedal combo. Wore my desk out from all the twisting and banging playing those dumb games! I had a workstation with dual Pentium Pro 200s (Intergraph) so no AGP and that was the only way to get 3D without mucking up 2D. Since this is predominately gaming talk I won't mention all the 3D Pro cards some which I still have (Oxygen Labs) for hall of fame!

In 1999 I loved the Voodoo3 3000s fast RAMDAC and 3D but its texture limit made Quake3 look like shit compared to the TNT2 Ultra. Kept going back and forth between those. Fav system to game on was a Socket 370 Celeron in a 'slotket' so it could fit in the slot1 Abit BX6 rev. 2.0. Fall of 1999 came the Geforce 256 and bought an Annihilator on release day. When the Annihilator Pro came out (DDR) that was the real upgrade I was looking for! From there I went to a 64MB Prophet II. Geforce3 was around the corner, had a few of those but really didn't see a jump until the Ti4600. ATI hit one out of the park with the 9700 Pro. Anyways I've rambled on long enough about this, could probably write a book honestly on all the stuff I've done with this hardware particularly with cooling stuff down! ;-)
 
Matrox G200. One of my favorite games was Death Track Racing (I think it was marketed under a different name as well)
 
I guess maybe a Riva TNT. The Matrox Millennium was first GPU, though it was paired with a 3dfx Voodoo 1 which was my first 3d accelerated card. The Matrox was not a 3d card, and the Voodoo was not a full GPU,only an add-in card. I think I also had a Mystique but 3D was so crap on it, you pretty much still needed a Voodoo.
 
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I *think* it wasn an 8800GT AGP from EVGA... In terms of a proper 3D accelerator.
 
It wasn't 3D unless you count Doom, but I had an ATI Mach32 video card that was super fast. It shot the plasma so fast I could lag out the other players when we played it on a lan :) It was a frame-buffer only, but was crazy fast. AGP slot I think.

The first 3d one (I couldn't afford the Voodoos) was I believe a Rendition Verite - Sierra Screamin'3D I think. I had a Roland Soundcanvas SCD-15 which was awesome, especially for games like Doom, King's Quest, etc. That was a $190 upgrade that was worth every penny. I eventually got an Aureal soundcard and Half-Life on that was amazing. Sound was directional, and I have yet to really get that same experience in a game since on any other soundcard.
Probably got it around here someplace.
After that it was an nVidia TNT2 Ultra.
 
Voodoo 2. Before that I had a couple VLB cards with an S3 chip and a PCI Matrox Millennium, but those aren't 3D. My experience with it was similar to cpufrost's -- too damned blurry at 1600x1200 on a 17" CRT (my eyes were better then...) with the pass-through so I was moving plugs around whenever I wanted to use it. I would have liked it much better if I'd had a dual input monitor. A couple years later I built a new rig with a Matrox G400 AGP card in it. That was the first 3D card I actually liked.
 
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