What was your least favorite graphics card?

[Deleted member 83233]

My least favorite was a full-length ISA Hercules monochrome card. We had it in an XT for a short time before we got a Paradise EGA card and Princeton EGA monitor. This was in the XT days. It's obvious why I hated it. I wanted to play Hero's Quest and Codename Iceman in color damnit! (I had a C64 then as well, so it wasn't a huge deal, but when we got the EGA card things started getting good.) Shortly after that we got an Amiga, and a 286/16 with 1MB RAM, a Soundblaster 1.0 and a 256K VGA card, so I was pretty happy. (I ended up stealing some 41256 RAM chips off another device and upgrading that VGA card to 512K) Later I stole all of those chips and put them on my Gravis Ultrasound.

 

[JustinCorrigible]

My least favorite was the Geforce 4 MX 440. I was barely making income at that time as a kid so felt REALLY ripped off coming from a Geforce 2 MX 400, and made sure to do my homework much more diligently on video card purchases (and saving up for higher tier models) in the future. I avoided buying nvidia because of that for almost a decade.

 

[trick0502]

My least favorite card was a 7800gt. Right after I got it the 7900gt came out. As bad as that was, the 8800gts destroyed it!

 

[drklu]

+1 for the gtx 480. I ended up putting a huge heatsink on it which helped a lot but dam that card ran hot
Hard to tell but I had the side 200mm fan feeding it as well as another 120mm fan on the other side.

 

[werrrd]

Agree with the 480--the only GPU I have ever returned. Ended up doing bios flashed 6950's in Crossfire for a comparable price.

 

[Decko87]

GTX 780, thing died twice and eventually i RMAed it a third time and got cash instead of a card back.

 

[lopoetve]

Right now anything ATI makes. Jesus fuck are those drivers shit. And the power management. And their display port power phase issues. And their display port crashing issues they’ve got.

Just spent 4 hours troubleshooting yet another crash issue; fuck it. I’m replacing it with a god damned 1060 and moving the fuck on. Ruining a good Ryzen system with this shit.

 

[70 Polara]

Speaking of solder / joint issues, Apple’s least favorite GPU must have been the G86m or 8600m GT which was in a lot of macbooks that would fail because of “bumpgate” where shifting / bad connection points between the GPU chip and board caused bad video and failures, dinging Apple’s reputation. As many of you may remember that also affected the integrated intel chipsets that Nvidia sold.
Apple must have really hated it because they never sold another Mac anything with Nvidia GPUs even when AMD graphics were far behind the curve at various points in time, years down the road.

Good point. These killed alot of Thinkpad T/R61s with the Quadro version and many various Dell models as well. I had a very nice R61 that died from this defect, and trying to find a later production date motherboard that had a supposedly fixed GPU on it proved to be too expensive. Put an Intel graphics motherboard in it and sold it off. I think many AMD integrated video laptops from that era had similar problems.....had a Compaq CQ61 that died of GPU failure, wasn't worth fixing.

 

[lazz]

This is a great thread.

The first GPU I ever bought myself as an adult was a GeForce4 Ti4200. About 3 months after I got it, it started producing an error whenever anything 3D was launched. I can't remember the wording but it invoked nv4_disp.dll. I tried for so, so many hours to fix that error - down to finally having a friend drop it in his system, and it turned out to be the card. I never did get an RMA on it either, as the 2D worked fine and they would only say it was software/OS.

It was a lot of money for me at the time (early aughts I think), and I was bitterly disappointed.

 

[tangoseal]

I dont think I ever had a least favorite. Quite possibly the 6990 AMD because it was so fucking hot .

 

[Kzoak]

Not a card but Integrated GPU though it's undoubtedly GMA500 that I consider to be the worst thing that ever happened to me.

 

[Psycrow]

Any radeons cards haha

 

[KingGlade]

NVIDIA Geforce GTX TITAN X. It performed well, but I hated how much I paid for it considering the 980ti came out 1 month later.

 

[Captain Newmackwa]

Any radeons cards haha

Nah. It depends. I had no issues with my HIS 9600XT except for the somewhat underwhelming performance but my Sapphire HD6950's drivers were awful and the fans were noisy even in idle so I sold it within a couple of weeks of owning it.

 

[Elios]

Radeon 9600SE it was some how SLOWER then a Redeon 9000....

 

[harmattan]

Two PITA GPUs
1) AMD 4870 x 2.
Just awful driver support.
2) GTX 480.....
Nuclear heater until watercooled.

At least the 4870 X2 desktop received driver updates, was well engineered, and was a relatively performant card at the time. The 4870 X2 mobility version didn't receive a single driver update through its lifetime. For the mobility card, ATI/AMD told notebook manufacturers it was up to them to provide updates -- ludicrous. A $700 flagship laptop card, not a single driver update... The only reason AMD didn't face a class action, IMO, was the small number of people who bought laptops with the card (only Alienware M18, Asus and Clevo had models with the 48070 X2 mobility, if I recall). Good old Hector Ruiz... I've told the 4870 X2 mobility story here before, but it will never stop burning my ass. I know AMD is an entirely different company now, but circa 2009 AMD was awful.

As I understand it, AMD was in the middle of turning over ATI designs (and the former team) at this time and the execs instituted an aggressive policy to drop all support for legacy products (including ones just released). The lesson learned for me was to never, ever buy a product from a company that is in the process of being acquired, or was still putting out designs from an acquired company.

On the bright side, although it was a barn burner for a laptop card, it was fast as hell when playing a concurrent game.

Edit: I'll add another to my list of least favorite card: the Geforce 4600 ti. Not because it was a bad card, but because of my own stupidity. I broke two VRMs when trying to fit it in a case that was too small for the components. Thank goodness for full-length card shrouds on most cards nowadays.

 

[RomeoGolf87]

AMD 6950. Even flashed to 6970, this card felt like it ran out of gas far too quickly in its life cycle

This exactly, but I still enjoyed the card for it's time. It just felt it didn't hang in there long enough.

 

[Ehren8879]

This exactly, but I still enjoyed the card for it's time. It just felt it didn't hang in there long enough.

Not to mention it's the newest card series to go to legacy driver status.

 

[COCOViper]

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.

YES that hunk of junk was my first video card purchase. The only thing it even did halfway decent was the bundled Mechwarrior 2. I'm thankful for the pain as it was a wake up call to never trust box marketing, ads, or really basic reviews. From then on I made sure to take the time to really understand what I was dumping my money on.

 

[Halon]

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.

The Radeon VII was an effort by AMD to take dies intended for the Radeon Instinct market that wouldn't pass muster, then use them to bolster its credibility in the high end gaming market. As you found out, they were not broadly competitive. The saving grace for them is that their FP64 speed is preposterously high at the price point and 16GB of extremely fast RAM. I'd imagine a fair number of scientific computing enthusiasts, DaVinci Resolve users, and scientists doing prototyping snapped them up and put them to work, but that doesn't make it a less bitter pill to swallow for a gamer. It's barely 50% faster than a Vega 56 at half the price with a cruddy cooler. Honestly, I'd be mad too.

Radeon 9600SE it was some how SLOWER then a Redeon 9000....

That's the magic of starving a competent core of memory bandwidth. I remember a guy who dashed out and bought a 9600SE to replace his Geforce3 Ti 500, and watched his expression of disappointment turn to dark-faced rage as I explained how he'd wasted his money.

 

[ShuttleLuv]

I don't recall ever having massive issues with cards themselves, mostly a glitch or two with chipset incompatibility (which was alot worse then with chipsets such as VIA and SIS competing). The worst card I've ever used would probably be the Radeon 8500 (massive driver issues, unfixable, huge power draws, lockups etc). When it worked it was fast, but that's when it worked. I tend to think it was chipset incompatibility mostly though. Rendition and i740 worked flawless in my testing, ran games fine save for a incompatiblity here and a openGL ICD Wrapper there...

P.P.S anyone remember Azzo? I remember calling and ordering from that place like mad. And 2cooltek. Memories...

 

[Mr. Bluntman]

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 had one of these too. Unfortunately I sold mine years ago after I got my Canopus Pure 3D 6MB. There are a couple of games that look superior with the PowerVR PCX2 chipset - Tomb Raider uses subpixel accurate geometry and resolutions as high as 1024x768 being playable. Mechwarrior 2 is Z-Buffered, and pushes out draw distance and uses per pixel fog effects to good effect. The only limitation is that the resolution is locked to 640x480 when the hardware is capable of much more. And if you can find a copy, Resident Evil has bilinear filtered backgrounds contrasted to pixelated and unfiltered backgrounds on other hardware.

I have had three cards I liked least.

Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro 4MB PCI - As a 2D card coupled with a 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, running a VESA VBE 2.0 TSR in the background, it works well. It might not be as good as a Tseng Labs ET6000 but it's mostly good enough. The 86c325 chipset is not known for its 3D prowess as it as known as the original 3D Decelerator. Using it as a standalone card with nothing else is an abysmal experience. However OEMs loved it for its low cost, integrated RAMDAC, and ability to have 2MB versions built into motherboards. There are a couple games (one of my favorite being Terminal Velocity) that are "accelerated" by the chip natively in the S3D API. Mechwarrior 2 looks almost as nice as the 3dfx standard, but runs extremely slowly. There is a video here that illustrates how slowly it runs. Funnily enough I still have mine.

Matrox Mystique 4MB PCI - It's great for 2D, but like the early PowerVR cards sucked at 3D. My Matrox M3D I used to own gets an honorable mention here. It (Mystique) couldn't do bilinear filtering or alpha blended transparencies, but what it could do it could do relatively fast. It was best used as a 2D card for a 3dfx accelerator.

XFX nVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 c216 Black Edition 896MB PCIe - I went through three of these cards. None of them were stable at their stock overclock of 666MHz core. I would often get artifacts and a freeze or just the system freeze. I was sent a Radeon HD 4890 1GB as replacement and that card worked fine (except for the GPU scaler).

 

[pandora's box]

Probably the 6800GT and 7900GT that I owned. But not for the cards - for the damn drivers and the terrible anisotropic filtering. Shimmering everywhere - meanwhile on the ATI side at the time - perfect AF.

 

[Halon]

Probably the 6800GT and 7900GT that I owned. But not for the cards - for the damn drivers and the terrible anisotropic filtering. Shimmering everywhere - meanwhile on the ATI side at the time - perfect AF.

It's the one thing the FX series had going for it - whatever you could ding them for on performance and forward-looking features, texturing quality was solid, and Nvidia implemented an optional angle-independent anisotropic filtering method that looked better than anything available until G80 and R600 hit years later. But when the FX series took it on the chin for being a failed guess at where 3D was going, Nvidia scrambled to optimize for performance, that algorithm went the way of the dodo, and unless you enforced *very* strict texture filtering accuracy, the "optimized" anisotropic filtering in NV4x was just plain janky.

 

[Mr. Bluntman]

Right now anything ATI makes. Jesus fuck are those drivers shit. And the power management. And their display port power phase issues. And their display port crashing issues they’ve got.

Just spent 4 hours troubleshooting yet another crash issue; fuck it. I’m replacing it with a god damned 1060 and moving the fuck on. Ruining a good Ryzen system with this shit.

ATi's drivers have always been shit. I owned a Radeon 9800 Pro and returned it a week later and bought an FX 5900 Ultra because nVIDIA's drivers were at least fully functional. The entire time I had a Radeon HD 4890 1GB I couldn't get GPU scaling to work correctly. I have also had cards going as far back as the 3D Rage II and Rage Pro and the drivers sucked then too.

nVIDIA might be arrogant and is expensive these days but their driver team has been good more often than not.

 

[ShuttleLuv]

ATi's drivers have always been shit. I owned a Radeon 9800 Pro and returned it a week later and bought an FX 5900 Ultra because nVIDIA's drivers were at least fully functional. The entire time I had a Radeon HD 4890 1GB I couldn't get GPU scaling to work correctly. I have also had cards going as far back as the 3D Rage II and Rage Pro and the drivers sucked then too.

nVIDIA might be arrogant and is expensive these days but their driver team has been good more often than not.

Disagree here. The best time imo for ATI drivers was the 9500-9800 range (this was when they improved from the 8500 days), the XT/Pro is what started the downtrend (also imo) but it wasn't TOO bad here. The 5870 series is when it got real bad, but even that worked occasionally. Now? Shameful...

 

[BrandonMllr]

ASUS AMD Radeon 5770 1 ГБ и GTX 680 -when my dad bought this card, my age was 12))

 

[lopoetve]

Disagree here. The best time imo for ATI drivers was the 9500-9800 range (this was when they improved from the 8500 days), the XT/Pro is what started the downtrend (also imo) but it wasn't TOO bad here. The 5870 series is when it got real bad, but even that worked occasionally. Now? Shameful...

5870 was bad. 6870 was horrible (I had 2 in crossfire - worst idea EVER). Been up and down since. The RX cards have been bad news for me, and Adrenalin 2020 is... yeah, bad. Ironically enough, the 2019 drivers were pretty not-bad.

 

[pandora's box]

Disagree here. The best time imo for ATI drivers was the 9500-9800 range (this was when they improved from the 8500 days), the XT/Pro is what started the downtrend (also imo) but it wasn't TOO bad here. The 5870 series is when it got real bad, but even that worked occasionally. Now? Shameful...

I remember the days of using Omega drivers for that tiny bit more performance lol.

 

[Halon]

Seems like the last couple of releases for AMD drivers finally ironed out the black screen issues on my Vega and Fury cards. For whatever it’s worth the open Linux drivers are good as gold, and ROCm is great.

 

[lopoetve]

Seems like the last couple of releases for AMD drivers finally ironed out the black screen issues on my Vega and Fury cards. For whatever it’s worth the open Linux drivers are good as gold, and ROCm is great.

Last release made mine worse - you on optional or the WHQL / recommended ones?

 

[Halon]

Last release made mine worse - you on optional or the WHQL / recommended ones?

Latest optional at the moment. Last stable drivers seemed to resolve my issues.

 

[VoodooRufus]

Nvidia FX 5700 Ultra. Just wasn't great. Modded the voltage with pots for ram and GPU, still couldn't make it worthwhile. Blew it up somehow, moved on.

 

[Braindead]

Matrox G200 and its OGL wrapper. it was the first time I wanted something else as soon as possible.

 

[pippenainteasy]

AMD 6970 was pretty terrible at launch compared to the 5870 and was actually slower in some older DirectX APIs, yet was priced as a flagship. Reminds me a lot of the recent 1080 Ti > 2080 generation....

 

[Halon]

Nvidia FX 5700 Ultra. Just wasn't great. Modded the voltage with pots for ram and GPU, still couldn't make it worthwhile. Blew it up somehow, moved on.

Nvidia's entire branding strategy for the FX line was so frantic and full of overlap... The vanilla GeforceFX 5600 existed alongside the 5200 Ultra, which had faster RAM and was nearly the same price, but they offered nearly the same performance. Even after the face-saving redesign of the FX 5700 and 5900s, the 5700 Ultra wasn't much cheaper than the 5900XT, which cheerfully ate its lunch at everything but power consumption. What a mess.

 

[lopoetve]

Nvidia's entire branding strategy for the FX line was so frantic and full of overlap... The vanilla GeforceFX 5600 existed alongside the 5200 Ultra, which had faster RAM and was nearly the same price, but they offered nearly the same performance. Even after the face-saving redesign of the FX 5700 and 5900s, the 5700 Ultra wasn't much cheaper than the 5900XT, which cheerfully ate its lunch at everything but power consumption. What a mess.

I remember that time well. I’d just gotten to the point in my comp Sci degree to understand mistakes made. Nvidia was really trying to find a match or product features and price that would buy them time to get the next generation out. They did it- 6800 series was great.

 

[AIM9x]

• 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.

I know what you mean about early Nvidia cards having really bad image quality. I personally had an Nvidia Riva 128 (predecessor to the TNT lineup) to go along with my 3dfx Voodoo 2. I couldn't believe my eyes at how different things looked when I eventually went to a new card 3 or 4 years later. I used to degauss my monitor on occasion thinking it was the monitor, but those old nvidia cards were poorly designed. I even read reviews saying they had bad quality, but ignored them thinking it couldn't be THAT bad.

My worst gpu would be a tossup with that old nvidia riva 128 or the XFX 7970 DD card that had tons of graphical anomalies right out of the box (quickly returned).

 

[atp1916]

v4 4500

Real dog of a card.

 

[LGabrielPhoto]

The Radeon 64 SE...cause my NHL game keep rebooting my PC randomly. Got a Geforce and no issues after that.