What was your first HOLY COW! moment with an actual video card?

I had purchased probably 2 or 3 cheap video cards (with other cobbled together spare parts) leading up the first expensive one who's model number I can remember. My mind was blown with my Ati 9800xt and Half Life 2. Seems like forever ago.
 
lot of young people here.. so I gona throw a question for the older ones..

no one ever remember Supaplex for MS-DOS?. it was one of the first games I played for around 1991-1992 IIRC it was like a super vitamined boulder dash for the ZX Spectrum and Atari.. I was blown by that game for months, it was really challenging and I was never able to finish it all.. amazing game.

supaplex2.gif
 
Nope.. I got my first pc in 95ish I believe.. first games bought at best buy was Quake and Duke Numkem 3D atomic edition. Remember that clear as day.. the only 2 games i grabbed with my first pc also bought there same day I think.
 
I don't remember the first, it was probably something with my Riva TNT2. My most recent was going from a 560Ti to a 1070 with DOOM. I went from ~15fps to a buttery smooth 60.

RIVA TNT 2 back in 1999 ...Had just replaced my old card and playing Triple Play '99. Turned on some graphic setting...maybe it was hardware acceleration or D3D rendering and watching the dirt particles kick up after a slide. :wideyed: lol
 
When I got my Voodoo 4 4500 PCI in 2000. I spent most of the 90's gaming on a 486 DX4 100 without a powerful video card because we didn't have the money for upgrades. In 2000 I got my first new PC in years (HP Celeron 733 machine). I had been playing UT among other games with software rendering, but ended up buying a V4 4500 PCI on sale. I had to get a PCI based video card because my PC didn't have an AGP slot. I'll never forget the holy cow moment when I selected 3dfx Glide in the UT99 menu and saw proper graphics for the first time, and at a smooth framerate. I eventually upgraded to a V5 5500 PCI, and then the proper upgrades started coming later. Outside of laptops, that HP is the last OEM desktop I've owned.
 
Bought a Radeon 9800 XT back in the ealry 2000's - I remember installing the Animusic demo and blowing my friends away with how amazing it looked on my 2048x1536 CRT monitor lol.

My room was hot enough to heat the hallway outside of my bedroom lol. Good times
 
Radeon 9700pro. I was taking a CAD class at the time in high school (yeah - it was awesome) and so I knew what antialiasing was and anisotropic filtering were and what it could do to your performance (we had some 32MB GeForce cards that got raped any time we turned up the heat.

Well, I was playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault. I think the resolution was 1280x1024. Anyways - I kept turning the AA up... up.... up... and jacking the AF up...up...up... and it was still smooth! But holy shit the image quality was glorious. I could see all the way down to the draw distance and I could STILL see the texture nice and clear. Never had I seen that before.
 
From your past of living on the bleeding edge it's shocking you've not had 've for 2 years so far!!

Go buy it!!! Oculus rift is what I bought months ago and I'm like you.. will blow your mind!
As i get older i'm getting motion sickness in a lot of the first person games these days.. =( can only play for 30 mins at a time and when it hits I feel very ill for the remainder of the day.. So I've been afraid that VR would make me hurl immediately
 
As i get older i'm getting motion sickness in a lot of the first person games these days.. =( can only play for 30 mins at a time and when it hits I feel very ill for the remainder of the day.. So I've been afraid that VR would make me hurl immediately

I've only experienced motion sickness in one fps game and that is fallout 4 in 4k with my 1080sli. No idea if both card were working in it. Was strange to me.. took only a few mins and was in the beginning of the game when you first walk threw your old neighborhood.

I still played threw it for about 15 mins.. was nuts. Don't know if it was caused from low frame rate or being too smooth if that makes any sense.. haven't played it since.


You'll get that in vr in games were you walk around much like a fps game. Most games you move by teleportation to eliminate that effect.. though some games have movement options.

It's been talked about plenty on vr forums and most will tell you it's like sea sickness when your not used to being on a boat and just like sailors and fishermen, it's something you'll get used to after some time. So stop when the feeling comes on for awhile and then go back and play and you'll find you can play longer without it happening till your mind gets to a point were it won't happen anymore.
 
As I recall, it was a Rage Pro Turbo, playing the original Jedi Knight. Going from a 100MHz pentium that could barely run the game at all to 640 by 480 with a real 3D accelerator was like a revelation.
 
When I was younger and quake 2 and half life were all the rage (I miss those days), I always had pretty awful video cards. Ati was the family choice, god knows why. Rage 2, rage pro turbo, complete rubbish. I remember the particle effects from the rage pro. It couldn't draw circles or fade the particles at all. So for blood if you remember quake 2 software mode, it was red squares. 3d mode was supposed to be circles that fade as they fall. Well the rage pro would draw crosses. It couldn't handle arcs so it just cut the corners off the squares and make crosses that also did not fade.

Then one fine birthday my parents bought me a voodoo 3 2000.

OMG IT DRAWS CIRCLES!!!
 
I've have had many Wow! moments but the one that really sticks out more then anything else besides VR is the 9700Pro with FarCry - That was really a big jump, a Holy Cow moment! Half-Life 2 was decent as well. 8800GTX and Crysis was another Holy Cow Moment. Now VR is a Oh Shit!!! Moment.
 
One of my wow moments was when I got my first set of CRT 3D shutter glasses and played the original American McGee's Alice. Damn that looked good.
 
Diamond Monster 3dfx voodoo 2 card way back when. Massive step up from the S3 virge card I had.
 
Biggest wow moment for me was going from Starsiege: Tribes software mode (on some SiS GPU) to hardware glide with a voodoo3 3000. Jump in quality was crazy.

Now, I don't really get wowed graphically very often, and if I do, it's more art direction than what a new GPU brings to the table.
 
dual xeon x32** with a hd 5970 to dual E5-2670's and a 980ti. It felt good to pull the graphics way up on ARK.
 
Probably t he first game graphics the blew me away were the intro movie and gameplay to Wing Commander II; Vengeance of the Kilrathi. It was like a friggin' movie. Another early Wow! graphics moment: Legend of Kyrandia looked amazing for a 320x200 game - Westwood's color blending and animation was top-notch. Other, later Westwood games were equally gorgeous - Kyrandia 2: Hand of Fate and Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos both come to mind.

First 3D accelerated game that actually got me really excited... Wing Commander: Prophecy. I loved space combat sims like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander, but Prophecy was the first to bring the WOW! in true hardware accelerated 3D (Go, VOODOO!). FreeSpace 2 would take that crown a little while later.

wcsecretops.jpg
 
My first PC game was around 1990 and was called Crack Down. It was on two 5.25'' floppies, I doubt most of you guys here have ever seen a 5.25 floppy in person lol. I loved that game. I also played wolfenstein and quake throughout the 90's. But, none of those games required a discreet GPU because there really wasn't any at the time lol. I kind of took a hiatus from PC gaming in the early 2000's, I was more into cars at the time. But, I remember in early 2009 is when I built my first true gaming PC with a graphics card so I could play COD world at war with a friend. I built a Phenom II system, a 740 triple core CPU that I unlocked to a quad, and a gts 250 graphics card. That was an amazing setup to me at the time.

I've had a few holy cow moments with graphics cards over the years. I got a 4870 X2, the holy cow there was I was shocked at how much heat that thing put off. Good Lord it was a furnace. Another holy cow was when I got a 5830 and I first tried eyefinity with 3 monitors. Amazing. I also remember when I bought a gtx 460, at the time that was quite an amazing GPU. They overclocked so well they ran on par with the gtx 470's. That was definitely a holy cow moment. I could go on, tons of sweet GPU memories.
 
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That Orchid Righteous 3D (original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics) back in the day had me hooked- I was in line for a Monster 3D II (3Dfx Voodoo II, the sequel) when they released. I'd been building my own computers since the 386 days, and gaming as I could, but 3Dfx brought PC gaming into the modern era.
 
lot of young people here.. so I gona throw a question for the older ones..

no one ever remember Supaplex for MS-DOS?. it was one of the first games I played for around 1991-1992 IIRC it was like a super vitamined boulder dash for the ZX Spectrum and Atari.. I was blown by that game for months, it was really challenging and I was never able to finish it all.. amazing game.

supaplex2.gif

I still play spfix63.exe in DOSBox every now and then. Finishing this game is on my bucket list! :)
 
but my first "wow" moments started with:
Wolfenstein 3D
WOLF-T.png

Started on amstrads and went through many of these games too, especially Wolfenstein but missed most of the voodoo awesomeness later, sadly. This is probably the reason to prefer slightly more modern takes e.g. Doom3, where lighting and reflection were pretty well done.
A game which looks as good as acceptable movie CGI back then, on a wide range of hardware was pretty impressive.
 
My first foray into computer gaming was my most memorable gaming moment: playing Wizardry on an Apple ][e using a monochrome display. (Yes, it took 1 5.25" floppy to play.) :oldman:
 
I got a 4870 X2, the holy cow there was I was shocked at how much heat that thing put off. Good Lord it was a furnace.

Your post made me laugh :)
While I was thinking about being astonished at the graphics on screen thanks to the switch to a video card, there are definitely other holy cow moment types. On the issue of heat, you reminded me of the furnace that was my GTX470. And I do mean furnace literally, because at the time I was a broke grad-student in a tiny apartment. Thankfully, electricity was covered in my rent, so instead of paying for heat I would leave my PC on all the time (it was an AMD Phenom II which also ran mega hot) and the case open, running a game, which, I kid you not, would warm up my small apartment perfectly. Never paid for heat that whole year, just kept the PC going :)
 
My first PC game was around 1990 and was called Crack Down. It was on two 5.25'' floppies, I doubt most of you guys here have ever seen a 5.25 floppy in person lol. I loved that game. I also played wolfenstein and quake throughout the 90's. But, none of those games required a discreet GPU because there really wasn't any at the time lol. I kind of took a hiatus from PC gaming in the early 2000's, I was more into cars at the time. But, I remember in early 2009 is when I built my first true gaming PC with a graphics card so I could play COD world at war with a friend. I built a Phenom II system, a 740 triple core CPU that I unlocked to a quad, and a gts 250 graphics card. That was an amazing setup to me at the time.

I've had a few holy cow moments with graphics cards over the years. I got a 4870 X2, the holy cow there was I was shocked at how much heat that thing put off. Good Lord it was a furnace. Another holy cow was when I got a 5830 and I first tried eyefinity with 3 monitors. Amazing. I also remember when I bought a gtx 460, at the time that was quite an amazing GPU. They overclocked so well they ran on par with the gtx 470's. That was definitely a holy cow moment. I could go on, tons of sweet GPU memories.

I seen your 5.25 floppy and raise you a tape deck from the Atari 800 pc. Haha. I think that's what it was called back then.
 
Your post made me laugh :)
While I was thinking about being astonished at the graphics on screen thanks to the switch to a video card, there are definitely other holy cow moment types. On the issue of heat, you reminded me of the furnace that was my GTX470. And I do mean furnace literally, because at the time I was a broke grad-student in a tiny apartment. Thankfully, electricity was covered in my rent, so instead of paying for heat I would leave my PC on all the time (it was an AMD Phenom II which also ran mega hot) and the case open, running a game, which, I kid you not, would warm up my small apartment perfectly. Never paid for heat that whole year, just kept the PC going :)

hehe, I've owned a few 470's as well and while they are a hot running card (owned a 480 too, thats even worse) I'm literally serious they don't hold a candle to the 4870 x2.
 
Playing descent in the early 90s, just being able to almost freely fly around flip etc. Playing that online (along with doom 2, heretic, hexen, original rise of the triad with the heat seeking missle cam lol) vs friends via 14.4k modem lol it was so much fun
 
I think it was with Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, I finally bought a Monster 3D card (maybe the 3D II?). I was not only blown away by the graphics, but it ran much smoother, too!
 
GL Quake and Unreal on Glide using a Creative Voodoo Banshee and Creative 12MB Voodoo 2 was my moment. From that point on, I thought PC gaming was vastly superior visually than console gaming.
 
holy shit forsaken. that was literally the first game i tried with my shiny new voodoo 1 (it came bundled with the game). those lighting effects were god damn phenomenal. oh the memories...
I remember this British accent saying "orbital" while cycling through weapons, that game was dope
 
Playing descent in the early 90s, just being able to almost freely fly around flip etc. Playing that online (along with doom 2, heretic, hexen, original rise of the triad with the heat seeking missle cam lol) vs friends via 14.4k modem lol it was so much fun

Man I loved RotT! It was one my favorite games to play with my best friend and his 2 brothers. It was my favorite MP experience until I experienced Tribes! With my sweet sweet oc'd V3 3000 AGP...I remember getting that sweet Glide goodness vs the software renderin of my TNT...Thankfully Sierra patched the game to allow OpenGL support a bit later,
 
Forsaken was awesome. I think I played it on N64 though.

Not video card related, but anyone remember playing Spectre VR on the Apple IIe? That was mind-blowing, I don't think I even knew what 3D graphics were back then.

 
When I got a Voodoo 2. I had a pretty old, crap, system at the time but I was 18 and heading off to university soon and my parents agreed to put forward a pretty generous amount of money for me to build a computer, and I augmented that with my own cash. One of the things I really wanted was a good video card as the system I had was real trash (an integrated Video7 SVGA chip for those that remember). So I asked a friend who was much more up on tech than me what card to get and he said "a Voodoo 2, also a good 2D card like a Matrox". So ordered all that, it came in, and he came over to set it up for me while I was at work.

I got home and he fired up Quake, which I liked but ran like ass on my old system. He fired it up with software rendering at 640x480. I said "Man that works great, I'm happy, money well spent." He laughed and said no that was just for reference, then fired up GLQuake at 800x600 with bilinear filtering.

Mind. Blown.

I could not believe it looked so good and ran so SMOOTH.
 
Probably my first voodoo card. Man that shit rocked me. Quake was so buttery smooth with the voodoo glide driver and that hardware. Insane in the membrane... insane in the BRAIN! heh..

I still have a voodoo2 SLI rig ..

 
yeah going with "wtf is this apparatus?" in 1982. The Sinclair Spectrum 48k. Buut with PC I'd have to say after seeing hercules, CGA, going to the awesome EGA, VGA, SVGA...well...Voodoo2 donut demo changed my world..forever.
 
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