The very first one I started with was an S3 Virge DX card. It managed ok until I got a Guillemot TNT2 card and then a Voodoo3 AGP which lasted a good few years.
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The very first one I started with was an S3 Virge DX card. It managed ok until I got a Guillemot TNT2 card and then a Voodoo3 AGP which lasted a good few years.
Was that the thing like a cross between an old typewriter and a suitcase?
Fold-down top, with keyboard and about a 4" screen?
If so, I remember those. For a laugh, we installed AutoCAD. It ran, but took about an hour to redraw the Space Shuttle drawing .... in wireframe mode.
It really struggled .... but battled on and did it. Which surprised us greatly.
Very first computer was a Spectrum 48K circa 1984. But the first discrete graphics card I bought was this S3 Trio 64V+ , with 1 Megabyte (yep) of VRAM. As it had some empty sockets on the PCB, I remember visiting local computer stores to find out if I could pimp it by adding another 1Mb of VRAM but, sadly not.
https://imgur.com/a/MZsJyQM
Cirrus Logic, specced as part of a PC with a 486SX-33 CPU and probably 4MB RAM. From a company in Nottingham that advertised in the magazines - remember Micro Mart?
First standalone purchase I think was a Creative Labs Voodoo II.
I'm a young 'un, the first card I bought was a Radeon 6870 for $150 near the end of 2011. Graphics cards were a bargain back then, perhaps in part because hard drives were not as a result of the floods in Thailand.
But it's not the oldest card I've bought. That would be a Diamond Stealth 1 MB VLB card, in an attempt to revive my family's oldest computer. Alas, the problem was not the GPU, but most likely the motherboard, and I never got around to replacing that. Confirmation that the hard drives were also dead lessened the motivation for that project.
I've also bought a few 8600M GT cards, as spares for my first laptop. Those cards have a tendency to kick the bucket more quickly than the average card, but thankfully the laptop I use them in allows for replacing the GPU. So that would be the oldest card I've purchased and been able to put to use.
A single slot 256MB Leadtek 8800GT in 2008. Worked fine for the 1280x1024 resolution I used at the time. The 2x DVI sockets it had certainly haven't aged well though, part of the reason it I replaced it 2 years later.
3dfx Voodoo Banshee, but had some of those that you could add more memory by adding chips to the board for 1,2 or 4Mb.
3DFX Voodoo 2, in SLI. YES SLI!!!! Think we were still PCI in those days, but if I look back....what a machine.
Half life never looked so good!! So many hours wasted on death match.
It was nVidia Riva TNT2 16 MB
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. Really enjoyed that card.
I think a Paradise VGA Plus 16, and when that failed, some S3 Virge thing?
I think it was a Diamond Savage 3D or something, I had a company build it for me, as I was still too new to PC scene to build it myself.
Voodoo Banshee and Riva TNT2 were also cards I owned along the way, but so far back I forget the order. Then it becomes a little more clear - Geforce 3, Radeon 9700 Pro, X800 GTO2 (soft modded to X800 XT i think?), 9800...too many to remember to be honest.
A few others a long the way, working back...
2070 Super
RX 5700 XT
GTX 1080
GTX 970
HD 7970
HD 7870
GTX 460
HD 4850X2
HD 4870
8800 GT
Long time Hexus reader, first post. Always loved the QOTW wish I'd registered earlier :)
I always had some integrated graphics in my PCs, before I got into hardware and then I discovered a whole new world. My 1st graphics card I bought with my own money was the ATI Radeon 9500 (R300?)
I was still very new to the whole thing, and my only question to the guy selling it was "will it run Half Life 2?"
The first one I bought as a stand-alone component was a Geforce 4 MX440 but prior to that I was using a Voodoo 4 from a friend, before then I believe my first windows based machine had a 4MB video card of some sort, it was inside a Packard Bell pre-build running a P166 CPU. Adiboo anybody?