What was your least favorite graphics card?

[M76]

Based on the highly successful topic.

I ask what was your least favorite video card, when you made an awful purchase.

I have a few candidates for this and I don't even know which one to choose as the worst:

• Sector S3 Savage 3D 8MB - I got this card on a deal that if I don't like it I can return it no questions asked. And apart from running Unreal with S3TC and the famous Egypt demo map, it was trading blows with the Voodoo1 in everything else. So I returned it in a week.
  
• Butterfly Nvidia Riva TNT 16MB - My father had an ASUS V3400 at the time (ASUS's take on the same GPU) and I thought I can save a few if I buy a cheap mfg card. But this was a time when RAMDAC was still important as displays were all analog. It goes without saying that image quality was terrible. I couldn't get rid of it soon enough.
• ATI Rage 128 PRO 32MB - Got this when my TNT2 died, they said it was about the same performance. They were horribly wrong.
  
• Geforce 7600GS 256MB - I don't know what gotten into me when I got this, probably ignorance. Double the ram doesn't mean more performance automatically.
  
• ASUS AMD Radeon 5770 1GB - Same shit again, I should've looked at benchmarks.

These were my least favorite cards to own, I really don't know which was the most disappointing they were all terrible.

 

[Starfalcon]

Diamond i740 2D card to go with my Voodoo 2's...remedied that with a matrox shortly after.

 

[Tup3x]

ATI Rage IIc 4MB AGP. Graphics deaccelerator. On top of that nothing worked right. Visual issues in every game and when those weren't obvious the performance was horrendous.

 

[reaper12]

My least favorite card was my MSI GTX 680. Not because of the card itself but because the first 3 that I ordered arrived DOA. I had to do an RMA 3 times!!

 

[ChronoDetector]

Gigabyte GTX 780: This card does not play nice when you enable AA in game, it will only produce a blank screen and you can still hear the game running in the background.
ASUS TUF 5700XT - I just got rid of this card, half of the time the card itself will crash on me, resulting in a solid green screen and the entire PC will freeze, requiring a reboot.
And some ATI card I had back in 2004 or 2005, forgot the name of it, the card itself had serious defects, it would produce artifacts on screen and then my PC will lock up. I RMA'ed it and the manufacturer provided me with a brand new replacement of another model that was equivalent to the one I had.

 

[DooKey]

I have to second the i740 AGP. Just wasn't a very good card at all.

 

[Armenius]

I had a love-hate relationship with my 5900 XT. It got me through the great string of releases in the mid-2000s, but the half-assed DirectX 9 support made trying to play the newest releases a chore. The one good thing is that it played the DirectX 8 NASCAR Racing 2003 Season flawlessly, and I played that almost nonstop both online and off. Replaced it with a 7800 GS after a few years and that card wasn't headache inducing, which was nice.

 

[auntjemima]

Based on the highly successful topic.

I ask what was your least favorite video card, when you made an awful purchase.

I have a few candidates for this and I don't even know which one to choose as the worst:

• Sector S3 Savage 3D 8MB - I got this card on a deal that if I don't like it I can return it no questions asked. And apart from running Unreal with S3TC and the famous Egypt demo map, it was trading blows with the Voodoo1 in everything else. So I returned it in a week.
  
• Butterfly Nvidia Riva TNT 16MB - My father had an ASUS V3400 at the time (ASUS's take on the same GPU) and I thought I can save a few if I buy a cheap mfg card. But this was a time when RAMDAC was still important as displays were all analog. It goes without saying that image quality was terrible. I couldn't get rid of it soon enough.
• ATI Rage 128 PRO 32MB - Got this when my TNT2 died, they said it was about the same performance. They were horribly wrong.
  
• Geforce 7600GS 256MB - I don't know what gotten into me when I got this, probably ignorance. Double the ram doesn't mean more performance automatically.
  
• ASUS AMD Radeon 5770 1GB - Same shit again, I should've looked at benchmarks.

These were my least favorite cards to own, I really don't know which was the most disappointing they were all terrible.

All I got from this post was to never take your suggestions on graphics cards, ever.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

lets see.. the entire radeon x1000 line up.. i tried the x1500, x1600, x1650 pro, x1800 and x1950 pro. they all sucked. i hated them so much so that i didn't buy another radeon card again until the vega 56 that i bought in early 2019.

 

[SPARTAN VI]

GeForce 2 MX400. I "upgraded" to that from a Voodoo 3000 and it felt like there was virtually zero improvement.

At the time I was playing games like Empire Earth and Soul Reaver.

 

[Fix Me]

My least favorite card was probably a Kyro II I had. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't well supported which led to some odd issues with some games.

 

[Dan_D]

AMD Radeon HD 4870x2. I had two of these and in most games I could only get a single GPU out of the four working. Drivers were terrible and even when I could get two GPU's working, it was only on one card. I had Crossfire issues with the Radeon HD 7970 as well. Evidently, it was good to go for multimonitor gaming until you went past 3x 1920x1080. I had 3x 2560x1600 monitors and the Crossfire bridge of the day couldn't handle that much data.

I can't tell you how much time I spent trouble shooting these issues. I even went to AMD with these problems and worked with their engineers and driver guys on it. They even sent me an older BIOS and I borrowed one of Kyle's engineering samples and worked on the problem with that card as well. Nothing would fix these issues. These are easily the worst video card experiences I've ever had.

I ended up selling off the 4870x2's or returning them. I sold off the second Radeon HD 7970 and kept the first one. It went into another machine and as a single card, it worked very well for a long time.

 

[M76]

All I got from this post was to never take your suggestions on graphics cards, ever.

If those were the only graphics cards I ever had you'd be right. I still have a 82% track record. Meaning I liked 82% of the cards I had.
But also I like to experiment with eccentric and odd choices, (not just with gpus) so its inevitable that some of those won't be very good. But other times it is great value.

 

[spine]

Hands down for me it has to be the Matrox PowerVR based m3d.



Beautiful looking card, but almost totally useless as a 3d accelerator. In most cases, 3d hardware versions of games ran slower than the pure software rasteriser. Supposedly CPU bottle-necked, but that proved to be a cop out.

I formed a love/hate relationship after ditching it. I used to love digging it out and pairing it with whatever new CPU I just got to see if the performance could ever be as good a 3dfx Voodoo1 was.

 

[Kardonxt]

I have never had any trouble with any of my gaming rig GPUs other than a 5970 that I had flogged to death under water for years. Had issue getting it warrantied by ASUS but the card served me well and I loved my first eyefinity setup with it.

I can say there are a couple cards I barely remember owning because they were so meh. Those would be my GTX 295 single PCB and GTX 590. In both cases they were a side grade from xfire setups I was already running but I was young, dumb, and wanted to constantly be building cool rigs.

 

[pendragon1]

GeForce 2 MX400. I "upgraded" to that from a Voodoo 3000 and it felt like there was virtually zero improvement.

i won one of those at an AMD tech tour back in the day. i probably should have passed it on, it was pretty crap.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

I had one of these and it was garbage from day one. I think it went right into the Garbage as well...

 

[Domingo]

I had a Matrox Mystique. I bought it based on a magazine recommendation and it was a hunk of junk. It supported 3D via some sort of proprietary API that only like 2 games supported...poorly.
As a 2D card it was supposed to be on par with the previous (industry leading) Matrox Millennium cards. It failed there and was more expensive, too.

 

[N4CR]

S3 virge 1mb... Half Life at 320x240 was pushing it.. 640 was a slide show.

6970s were a POS too, especially the first Gigabyte Windforce models which loved heating one of the ICs to insta-burn-your-finger temperatures, by virtue of blowing hot VRM air on them and hot air from heatpipe fins.

 

[Halon]

The only graphics card I bought and returned in less than 24 hours was the XGI Volari V5 I snagged at Micro Center around 2005. No working driver support for Windows 2000 despite advertising it on the box, obviously broken 3D with driver cheats, and terrible performance despite those. I love supporting an underdog but that was disappointing and lousy. Honorable mentions:

* I loved the 2D on my Mystique, but the 3D was awful. Other 3D accelerators of the time supported early rendering features even if enabling them slowed down effective fillrate, which led to a mix of driver optimizations / cheating and user tinkering to maximize performance. Matrox's solution to the problems of fogging, mipmapping, alpha blending, and bilinear filtering was to simply not support those features at all. That broke a lot of DirectX games, and there were damned few titles built explicitly *for* the Mystique. There was also, predictably, no OpenGL support. All that said, it was a decent 2D card and worked with a 3DFX Voodoo Graphics board without any problems.
* A 2 MB S3 Virge I found on a roadside computer was alright for 2D. I have a vague memory of the Descent II native port running on it, and being impressed it worked at all.
* 64 MB PowerVR Kyro II was pretty solid when it didn't bump into driver issues or the simple limitations of its fillrate. UT2004 was that card's Waterloo for me, though DirectX 6 titles stuck in 16-bit color looked wonderful.
* An Albatron GeforceFX 5200 with 64-bit memory that was markedly slower than the 32MB Geforce2 MX I had sitting in my parts bin. Just dismal - I paid $20 for it and still felt vaguely offended.

I used to be in the habit of Frankenputer building with random hardware, and could probably think of more disappointing GPUs as the day unfolds. Looking back I get the feeling the ATi Rage Pro could have been a contender if the drivers had been worth a damn... The Linux drivers even got multitexturing working on it in some cases.

 

[Tup3x]

lets see.. the entire radeon x1000 line up.. i tried the x1500, x1600, x1650 pro, x1800 and x1950 pro. they all sucked. i hated them so much so that i didn't buy another radeon card again until the vega 56 that i bought in early 2019.

I had X1800XT 256MB. Died shortly after one year warranty ended. It was power hungry, noisy and had annoying video decoding issues. Reinforced my hate (thanks Rage IIc...). Did have R9 290 for about one month but there were annoying driver issues and stuff like that. Judging by people's experiences with Navi cards, I don't think that I'll be trying Radeon anytime soon.

 

[defaultluser]

Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. My first discrete graphics card, and it sucked. There were like two games were you could get playable frame rates.

I replaced it with a Rendition v2200 Thriller 3d. That still sucked, but it at-least played 3d games well. 2D DOS games, not so well.

I haven't really been that seriously disappointed with any cards I've purchased since. I've always done my research before buying. That said, nothing is perfect

My Riva TnT had piss-poor RAMDAC, my Matrox G400 had reintroduced me to the wonders of MiniGL, my Radeon 8500 had buggy drivers, but solid performance. my first did-not-have-a-single-issue video card was my GeForce 6600 GT. Fantastic drivers, outstanding performance for the price AND fantastic VGA quality.

 

[thecold]

x850 xt pe. That noise, trembles, that noise. For what I paid for it, the performance wasn't bad.


I remember it as the *OK, this noise is to much, I need be more careful*


I'm generally $$ for performance, so I actually haven't had any horrific cards. After the 850xt pe, I was more careful about noise. I'm fairly tolerant of noise, but that was a bit much.

 

[DogsofJune]

This is a hard question to answer. As all video card purchases were thought out and purchased to fit my needs and budget.

The GeForce 5 series was kinda meh.
I do recall purchasing a GTX 590 and sending it packing in less than a year.

 

[AthlonXP]

ATI Rage Fury Maxx.. My buddy got it and it sucked so bad.

 

[cyclone3d]

Hands down for me it has to be the Matrox PowerVR based m3d.

View attachment 214399

Beautiful looking card, but almost totally useless as a 3d accelerator. In most cases, 3d hardware versions of games ran slower than the pure software rasteriser. Supposedly CPU bottle-necked, but that proved to be a cop out.

I formed a love/hate relationship after ditching it. I used to love digging it out and pairing it with whatever new CPU I just got to see if the performance could ever be as good a 3dfx Voodoo1 was.

I tried one of these back in the day... sucked at the time so I took it back and got a 3dfx Voodoo Rush. That sucked as well. Took it back a couple days later and got a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee which was much better.

 

[Halon]

Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. My first discrete graphics card, and it sucked. There were like two games were you could get playable frame rates.

I replaced it with a Rendition v2200 Thriller 3d. That still sucked, but it at-least played 3d games well. 2D DOS games, not so well.

I haven't really been that seriously disappointed with any cards I've purchased since. I've always done my research before buying. That said, nothing is perfect

My Riva TnT had piss-poor RAMDAC, my Matrox G400 had reintroduced me to the wonders of MiniGL, my Radeon 8500 had buggy drivers, but solid performance. my first did-not-have-a-single-issue video card was my GeForce 6600 GT. Fantastic drivers, outstanding performance for the price AND fantastic VGA quality.

Just because I'm old enough to remember these...

* Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 was a first gen S3 Virge. I'm not playing it up when I say that you have my sympathies.
* Rendition V2200 was a solid Voodoo1-class card with quirky drivers. After Micron bought Rendition, they pretty much mismanaged them into oblivion and the driver support dried up. It's a shame - the programmable microcode could have given their cards longevity.
* Nvidia didn't enforce RAMDAC quality on its partners until around the GeForce4, by which point they'd developed a reputation for skimping out and decided to fix it. Nothing like a brand new card with a jittery image at resolutions above 1024x768.
* G400's OpenGL was all over the map. First it was a wrapper that translated OpenGL to Direct3D, then it was an optimized miniGL, and finally they came out with a proper GL implementation that was still hinky and slower than most of the competition. The dualhead was pretty good, though.
* Radeon 8500 was a nice piece of hardware with some undersized internal caches that resulted in performance problems and efforts to optimize drivers around them. There's a reason the Radeon 9000 was surprisingly performance-competitive: they fixed the glitches.
* 6600GT ruled! Absolutely thumped my 5900XT in every way but texture quality.

 

[pendragon1]

this thread is making me feel old...

 

[Flogger23m]

EVGA GTX 560ti 2GB. It had one very awkward issue in that it would only power on normally every other power on. I could turn on my PC twice normally typically. The next time I'd power it on, be it later that day, the next day or a few days, didn't matter, it would not display. The fix was to turn off the PSU, turn it back on and then power on the PC. No issues aside from that.

Tried numerous other GPUs. Put my old EVGA GTX 260 inside, continued to work flawlessly. Put in ATI/AMD cards, flawless. GTX 570s, flawless. I could put the 560ti 2TB in another PC (mostly same specs) and it would also work flawless.

I sent it back to Amazon, got a replacement which also had the same issue. Used it for a while. I would simply hit the PSU off switch before turning on my PC to avoid the issue if it was off.

Must have had some particular issue with my particular motherboard, BIOS or something. Sold it on a forum noting the issue, but the person who received it said it never had any issues. They replied some months later saying it was working 100% flawless.

Awkward issue. When it outputted picture it worked 100% flawlessly.

 

[jbltecnicspro]

Honestly, I only really regret two video cards I've ever had:

1. HIS Radeon HD-7750. No matter what I did with the card, no matter what I played, it would always have a stutter or pause when first loading the level of a game I was playing. I eventually moved it into a Linux box I had at the time and strangely enough it worked just fine. I suspect that there was some bad component interaction but I was never able to trace it down in my main rig.
2. Mobility Radeon 9600. It was in my eMachines that had an AMD-64 CPU in it at the time. Very good specs for the mobile world. In fact, other than the 9700 (which was the same architecture but higher clocks), nothing really was better than it until the Mobility Radeon 9800 in the Dell XPS. But there was one serious catch... 64MB VRAM. Seriously eMachines - why? Unless I lowered the textures to "low" on more recent games, it would be a stutter fest, even when the card could technically run the game at a decent framerate. That was the tragedy that was the Mobility Radeon 9600 - at least in that machine. Most other 9600's were equipped with 128MB of VRAM but not that one. Shame on you eMachines...

 

[AlexisRO]

Least favorite would be an S3 Trio can't remember if it was 4/8mb.... awfull, glitches everywhere, low performance, at some point it died. Had it replaced with a Riva card, night and day difference.

Very close second would be my GeCube 9600Pro. When it worked it was bliss, trouble was that i had such luck that i maybe played 20% of my time, the other 80 was troubleshooting various issues. And trying to download 20-30mb drivers was a pain. Omega drivers made it more bearable but still... On top of everything the POS died in the first day out of warranty. Maybe it should be my least favorite hmmm.

 

[jbltecnicspro]

Least favorite would be an S3 Trio can't remember if it was 4/8mb.... awfull, glitches everywhere, low performance, at some point it died. Had it replaced with a Riva card, night and day difference.

Very close second would be my GeCube 9600Pro. When it worked it was bliss, trouble was that i had such luck that i maybe played 20% of my time, the other 80 was troubleshooting various issues. And trying to download 20-30mb drivers was a pain. Omega drivers made it more bearable but still... On top of everything the POS died in the first day out of warranty. Maybe it should be my least favorite hmmm.

Radeon Omega Drivers were my savior back in the day. Whatever happened to him?

 

[SeymourGore]

The only GPU purchase that I've made that disappointed me was my Radeon VII. Totally self induced, though; I read the reviews, saw the complaints (loud, hot, buggy, spotty performance) but plopped the money down for one to replace my 1080 (hybrid unit too) - total AMD fanboy move, I know. Sold that GPU only a few months later (picked up a 2080 Super).

Still, every other GPU purchase of mine has been well thought out and planned - so I'm rarely disappointed.

 

[pendragon1]

Honestly, I only really regret two video cards I've ever had:

1. HIS Radeon HD-7750. No matter what I did with the card, no matter what I played, it would always have a stutter or pause when first loading the level of a game I was playing. I eventually moved it into a Linux box I had at the time and strangely enough it worked just fine. I suspect that there was some bad component interaction but I was never able to trace it down in my main rig.
2. Mobility Radeon 9600. It was in my eMachines that had an AMD-64 CPU in it at the time. Very good specs for the mobile world. In fact, other than the 9700 (which was the same architecture but higher clocks), nothing really was better than it until the Mobility Radeon 9800 in the Dell XPS. But there was one serious catch... 64MB VRAM. Seriously eMachines - why? Unless I lowered the textures to "low" on more recent games, it would be a stutter fest, even when the card could technically run the game at a decent framerate. That was the tragedy that was the Mobility Radeon 9600 - at least in that machine. Most other 9600's were equipped with 128MB of VRAM but not that one. Shame on you eMachines...

shame on you for buying emachine! eeeyuck

 

[jbltecnicspro]

shame on you for buying emachine! eeeyuck

Hey, this was back in 2003. Actually, considering what it had under the hood, it wasn't too bad!

AMD A64 3200+
512 MB RAM
80GB (4200 RPM!!!) HDD
Mobility Radeon 9600

Not too shabby in that time. And it was pretty inexpensive.

 

[AlexisRO]

Radeon Omega Drivers were my savior back in the day. Whatever happened to him?

TBH not sure, saw a few theories that he may have joined the Catalyst team but it's everyone's guess really. Sad day when the Omega drivers stopped.

 

[DogsofJune]

this thread is making me feel old...

At least I didn't complain about the old Trident 1 Meg 16 bit ISA video card I had.

Damn those Win 3.0 days

 

[Armenius]

Radeon Omega Drivers were my savior back in the day. Whatever happened to him?

They worked great for D3D, but they completely broke OpenGL even more than AMD's broken support for the API back in the day. My university laptop had a Mobility X800 XT that almost all of us installed the Omega drivers on and it initially made our OpenGL class quite humorous when it started.

 

[defaultluser]

Hey, this was back in 2003. Actually, considering what it had under the hood, it wasn't too bad!

AMD A64 3200+
512 MB RAM
80GB (4200 RPM!!!) HDD
Mobility Radeon 9600

Not too shabby in that time. And it was pretty inexpensive.

Right - after Emachines discovered they couldn't sustain their smashing introduction by continuing to sell cheap PCs (their target market felt no need to upgrade), so the changed-up and started offering discount performance (think Acer).

It wasn't enough to save the company. In fact, they were bought by Gateway, who was then bought by Acer

 

[Armenius]

Hey, this was back in 2003. Actually, considering what it had under the hood, it wasn't too bad!

AMD A64 3200+
512 MB RAM
80GB (4200 RPM!!!) HDD
Mobility Radeon 9600

Not too shabby in that time. And it was pretty inexpensive.

My first PC was an eMachines from 1998. I fit every PCI video card upgrade I could into that thing until building my first custom box in 2001. Had a 600 MHz Celeron, if I remember correctly, with 128 MB of memory.