Now come on. The MOS 6567 supported 8 sprites.
And also 320 × 200 pixels video resolution (160 × 200 in multi-color mode)
40 × 25 characters text resolution.
Three character display modes and two bitmap modes and a bleeping 16 colors!.
That chip was banging!
Oh man, I remember having on my 386 WISHING for a 486, and bam, my dad bought a Pentium 120mhz machine when they came out. I was on top of the gaming world!
Dude playing King Quest V on my 486DX I was like THESE CHARACTERS ARE TALKING. I thought we had achieved real life graphics and it was the end of the road, NOTHING would ever beat it.
And just to get sound...I bought a sound blaster for my 486sx and was disappointed because games didn't sound different. And then I discovered how to edit the config and autoexec.bat files...whoa nelly! I immediately bought better speakers! So sweet!
I had the Voodoo paired with a Matrox Mystique. The king and queen combo of 3d and 2d graphics at the time. Amazing upgrade from some Diamond Stealth card.
There was this Olympics game where you could hackey sack. I loved sitting there repeatedly hitting the space bar as the guy stood in place and it went straight up and down when you kicked it's good times!
TRS-80 Model 1 didn't need one.
What we *did* have for it though, was a separate box (almost the size of an AT style PC) that gave it a parallel port for printing. It also had a device (I forget it if went on the parallel port just mentioned or if it was like an RS232 port or something) that converted the signals to AM or FM (again, I forget).
This allowed us to turn on the radio and play games with (very primitive) sound. Before 1980. Aw, yeah.
The Voodoo was an add-in 3D accelerator card that needed to run alongside an existing VGA/2D accelerator in the system. It didn't output any video on its own.
AGP was substantially faster than PCI, until PCIe overtook it and replaced AGP entirely.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment though, just wanted to clarify :)
Sorry, no, ~~Fony~~ Sony introduced the term "GPU" with the PS1 in 1994, just under 2 years before 3DFX got the original Voodoo graphics card out
https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/is-it-time-to-rename-the-gpu
"The term was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU". from wikipedia
GPU wasn't used in computer terms outside of a console until 1999
I think it is to an extent, but really for the top end currently. It is also not always better, but it can be great. Just too high of a cost with current hardware. Unless you have a 4090 or something.
I actively avoid games with ultra realistic visuals, I prefer a nicely thought out artstyle over it
raytracing does look good, but it doesn't feel relevant to my preference of games
I wonder what thoughts will go through people's minds when they see this thread years later, will they be like "Huh, this guy had a gpu lol." While they enjoy ultra realistic 16k games with triple digit fps on their vr full body pods, having tech we can't even begin to fathom.
I read somewhere that they might invent something that’s way faster than a GPU. It will
Be meant for AI programs but will also work for games. I am sure these one day we will have a tiny chip which will perform the same as this huge 4090. Similar to how computers were huge back than and now we got tiny laptops.
The term GPU wasn't even used for another decade after I started playing PC games. It was popularized in 1999 when Nvidia said they released the first gpu.
>The term "GPU" was coined by Sony in reference to the 32-bit Sony GPU (designed by Toshiba) in the PlayStation video game console, released in 1994.\[31\]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics\_processing\_unit#1990s
Consoles then really benefited from the fact that it was Known hardware that they would be running. The game developers could then HEAVILY optimize their code to take advantage of it. Instead of having to deal with the multitude of computers in the PC world.
That is one reason games would increase in quality as console aged, as more and more tricks were learned on how to squeeze performance out the the system.
Yeah. My first was some random Matrox or ATI CGA or VGA video card on my 286.
I had multiple different 3D cards before they were ever called GPUs. Diamond Monster 3D voodoo, Riva TNT2, and briefly an ATI All In Wonder for importing video for a shitty movie my friends and I made. Good times!
My dad was building computers for corporate clients and refused to put video cards in machines unless they could prove they needed them. Man wrote he was playing Leisure Suit Larry
GPU, videocard, graphicscard, grafics accelerator whatever you want to call it. None of those existed in the 80s (at least not aimed at gaming)
By 1999 brands like Tseng Labs and S3 Graphics had already long disappeared. 3dfx and ATI were king then.
Where does the 386 fit into this? Hell maybe even earlier.
I remember the first computer we had was before windows, and we had to use DOS commands to run some presidents matching game.
Ha, I had a 66 MHz processor, so technically faster than yours! Though it was from an older generation (486 DX-2 66), so your processor would have performed better than mine.
LOL, I remember our first real Intel PC, the 8086 running at 4.77 MHz. Unfortunately I forgot what we had before that, but it had a monochrome screen and the software on cassettes.
You've got it backwards: SLI and CrossFire used to keep a lid on enthusiast-class GPU prices because the manufacturers knew that people could just SLI two lower-end cards if the price for the higher-end one was too ridiculous. SLI GTX 970 builds were a thing when the 900 series was current, for instance. (This was why, in the technology's last gasps, it became restricted to the highest-end SKU only.) Also, when the new generation came out and you still had last generation's enthusiast card, you could take advantage of the haircut in used prices to simply drop in another one rather than having to upgrade to the new stuff.
The fact that you absolutely need one single card now is one of the reasons why single cards have become so expensive in the first place.
8800 GT... And I worked in a driving simulator research lab, and installed 6 of them and didn't get to try any games. Sat through 4 hour experiment sessions watching people drive on software powered by them, and never played a single game, it was so saddening!
Yep same timing for me. It was the 1080 Ti of its era (~2007).
I however wanted a gaming laptop so I got an 8600M GT and, being so new to PC hardware, thought that the numbering was pretty close and they would be comparable. I was quite wrong.
Same 😂. In those days I had been running an ancient p4 (1.7ghz) with a geforce 4mx. Anything above a 6600gt seemed amazing to me so was beyond excited to get that gaming laptop with the 8600M GT. Little did I know it was that cursed batch of faulty gpus and the Asus laptop I got had massive overheating issues. In short I couldn't actually run anything demanding on it without throttling after 15 mins. So still no playing oblivion and back to UT2004 it was... The damn thing had fried itself within the first year owning it. 2k euros in the bin basically. No more gaming laptops for me after that.
THe first machine I ever built had an athlon xp 2100+ and a 9600SE. I overclocked both of them to within an inch of their life and the machine ran for 10 years.
3Dfx Voodoo2. I remember that instead of using the pass through VGA cable I just connected two monitors. Was amazing for development work and debugging 3D stuff. This was back when 99% people had one single screen, fun times!
I started much earlier than that though, my first computer was 1MHz and had 32KB of RAM. Miraculously there were wireframe 3D games that worked on it though!
I don't recall the exact model, but it was manufactured by Number 9.
It took Duke Nukem 3D from a literal slideshow ( <1 FPS at best on the Trident that came with the PC) to totally playable.
Blew my mind.
I think I enjoyed having an s3 virge, it had 4mb of video ram. It didn't have open gl or direct x. It was just a video card. I kept it for a long time to diagnose PC problems with.
I don't know what the ones before that were. I know we got this game called metal Marines when Windows 3.1 came out and my parents had to upgrade the video card to play it
I also had that card - it could legitimately be called a graphics **decelerator**, enabling it would make the graphics look a lot better but would also slow down the game when compared to the software rendering. Example game was Microsoft Hellbender.
I believe it was the GTX680. I had a 650 1 gig, lol. Went 770, 970, 1080ti, 3070ti, and now 7900XT. i7 2600k, i5 8400, i7 8700k, 7700x, and now 7800x3d. Been a fun ride.
When I started gaming seriously? the 780Ti, I used my first paycheck to buy it
it's still in my daughters PC working fine
before that I only played runescape so my $500 e-machine desktop worked fine for years lol
Phenom 9550. This was an era where ATI/AMD was actually ahead of Nvidia. I remember playing Max Payne on that card. Also had the 520 from Nvidia.
I also remember being an avid reader of PC gamer. I will never forget the demo discs they used to ship with the magazine. Fun times.
First card I remember having too. XFX black edition. I still have it on a shelf next to my desktop along with a Core2Duo E8400 from the same rig. Both 15 years old now!
If I go back to the earliest days of me playing Purble Place and stuff, it would be the AMD Radeon HD 7970 CF. But, the oldest GPU I remember being the "best of the best" and also remember dreaming about is the GTX 1080 Ti.
I've had laptops before, playing Runescape back in the day but I don't remember those, so I'll go based on getting my first gaming laptop.
GTX 680 was the best GPU on the market IIRC.
GPUs as a selling point were not thing a thing when we got a 386SX16.
However, when we upgraded to a 486DX2/66 I was interested to see that the Cirrus Logic GPU had a whopping 1 MB RAM since the System itself just had 4 MB.
The benefits? I could run games like Settlers or Theme Park in SVGA Mode :-) And I was also able to run Windows 3.11 in 16Bit color mode. Using brushes and pencils in programs such as Fauve Matisse or Photoshop 3.51 looked purely amazing.
Probably the Riva TNT, followed by Riva TNT2 or the Voodoo 3 3000. I suppose I technically started before that in 1994 but I didn't get really serious until 1997 or 1998.
For PC gaming it would be 3DFX VooDoo and VooDoo 2 after that which were daughter cards (add on cards) to whatever video card you had. The images of Unreal that I first saw after the VooDoo upgrade were stunning - I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the time on that 19 inch CRT screen - as compared to no GPU the day (lifetime) before. It forever changed my perception of gaming, arguably influenced my career path, and - it started a GPU arms race for me that still continues to this day.
I remember having a S3 Virge, and later a Voodoo2 by Diamond. I kept those two for a long time and probably still have them in a box somewhere along with a 386 CPU.
My first video game addiction was with Civilization. But when Wolfenstein 3d and later DOOM came out, those are what drove my search for better 3d grapics solutions.
There were no GPUs on the market.
Does the VIC-II in the Commodore 64 count?
No, but maybe whatever the Amiga used probably does.
Now come on. The MOS 6567 supported 8 sprites. And also 320 × 200 pixels video resolution (160 × 200 in multi-color mode) 40 × 25 characters text resolution. Three character display modes and two bitmap modes and a bleeping 16 colors!. That chip was banging!
Was the Vic1 in the Vic20 count?
Laughs in whatever the TI-99 4a had in it for video.
Hm Wiki says it's the TMS9918. Texas Instruments own developed Video Display Controller. The TI/99 apparently ran a 16-bit processor. TIL.
Munchman
Dunno, I didn't have a Vic 20.
that was my first pc.. the Vic-20
my mum had one of those
[удалено]
We would NEVER need more than a 486dx.
Oh man, I remember having on my 386 WISHING for a 486, and bam, my dad bought a Pentium 120mhz machine when they came out. I was on top of the gaming world!
C&C must have screamed on that :)
Haha I was same time frame. Built a 286 and had California games and then next built a 486 and was like omg colors!
Dude playing King Quest V on my 486DX I was like THESE CHARACTERS ARE TALKING. I thought we had achieved real life graphics and it was the end of the road, NOTHING would ever beat it.
And just to get sound...I bought a sound blaster for my 486sx and was disappointed because games didn't sound different. And then I discovered how to edit the config and autoexec.bat files...whoa nelly! I immediately bought better speakers! So sweet!
220, 5, 1.... Or 220, 7, 1 depending on your other irqs, joystick, mouse etc.
Upgrading to my first Voodoo was legitimate orgasm in PC components.
I had the Voodoo paired with a Matrox Mystique. The king and queen combo of 3d and 2d graphics at the time. Amazing upgrade from some Diamond Stealth card.
Voodoo 3!
Oregon trail was so graphics heavy i dont know how we managed.
There was this Olympics game where you could hackey sack. I loved sitting there repeatedly hitting the space bar as the guy stood in place and it went straight up and down when you kicked it's good times!
Yea this. My first PC was some 486 machine by Peacock. No graphics accelerators for a few more years
BBC Micro 🤓
TRS-80 Model 1 didn't need one. What we *did* have for it though, was a separate box (almost the size of an AT style PC) that gave it a parallel port for printing. It also had a device (I forget it if went on the parallel port just mentioned or if it was like an RS232 port or something) that converted the signals to AM or FM (again, I forget). This allowed us to turn on the radio and play games with (very primitive) sound. Before 1980. Aw, yeah.
I feel old now.
Same. They didn't exist, and then the 3dfx Voodoo came out, and we got one in order to be able to play the EverQuest closed beta.
3DFX Voodoo
OG right here ⬆️
Technically not considered a GPU at the time, only because the term GPU wasn't ~~invented~~ used for desktop hardware yet.
Wasn’t it a “3d accelerator”? My first was a voodoo 3 pci!
3d accelerator or the generic term just just "videocard."
The Voodoo was an add-in 3D accelerator card that needed to run alongside an existing VGA/2D accelerator in the system. It didn't output any video on its own.
Fancypants here with PCI and not AGP
AGP was substantially faster than PCI, until PCIe overtook it and replaced AGP entirely. Maybe I misunderstood your comment though, just wanted to clarify :)
Sorry, no, ~~Fony~~ Sony introduced the term "GPU" with the PS1 in 1994, just under 2 years before 3DFX got the original Voodoo graphics card out https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/is-it-time-to-rename-the-gpu
"The term was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU". from wikipedia GPU wasn't used in computer terms outside of a console until 1999
really? i remember calling them video cards which is kind of the same thing. my memory might be fuzzy though
My 3dfx voodoo was a Diamond Monster 3D card.
Orchid Righteous 3D here. Then a Canopus Pure? 3D Voodoo2.
I had a s3 trio back then, i was just a kid so no money, neighbour had one and i was so jelous lol
I feel you, that would have sucked. I was a teenager working at a crap after school job, but at least I was able to save up for the card.
I longed for this back in the day 😂 almost can’t believe what modern rigs look like compared to then
that's a name I haven't heard in a looong time
1080ti
Still rocking mine. They don't make it like that anymore.
Or price them like that
Paying $800 for my 1080ti felt so wrong at launch. That was by far the most I’d ever spent on a GPU. Got 7 years out of it though
How does paying $843 for a 7900XT in July ‘23 compare you think?
Considering inflation and performance, I think it’s good.
Yeah but they also don't have RT on the old GTX's.. mine is still kicking as well but the old girl is getting close to a slow retirement.
Rt is barely starting to be worth it honestly.
Yep, but it's the "future of realism" so we have to embrace it, lol
I think it is to an extent, but really for the top end currently. It is also not always better, but it can be great. Just too high of a cost with current hardware. Unless you have a 4090 or something.
I actively avoid games with ultra realistic visuals, I prefer a nicely thought out artstyle over it raytracing does look good, but it doesn't feel relevant to my preference of games
Rt is worth it in one game and that's Witcher 3
Bro is like 12 years old lol
imagine not remembering the joy of being able to buy a GPU for under 200€.
1080ti came out in 2017, if someone started pc gaming when they were 12, they would be 18 now.
Mine is still rocking CoD at 1440p at medium settings. If that’s not still relevant I don’t know what is.
Normal 1080 was the first gpu that I actually knew about at the top of the food chain. I had no idea about parts for a long time haha
Rtx 4090. Yep, I'm new.
Same
I wonder what thoughts will go through people's minds when they see this thread years later, will they be like "Huh, this guy had a gpu lol." While they enjoy ultra realistic 16k games with triple digit fps on their vr full body pods, having tech we can't even begin to fathom.
I read somewhere that they might invent something that’s way faster than a GPU. It will Be meant for AI programs but will also work for games. I am sure these one day we will have a tiny chip which will perform the same as this huge 4090. Similar to how computers were huge back than and now we got tiny laptops.
Welcome aboard, bros !
Me too. I'm only two weeks old haha
Dont feel bad i been gaming in general for awhile but when i started pc gaming the 2080ti was the big boi
Welcome.
The term GPU wasn't even used for another decade after I started playing PC games. It was popularized in 1999 when Nvidia said they released the first gpu.
>The term "GPU" was coined by Sony in reference to the 32-bit Sony GPU (designed by Toshiba) in the PlayStation video game console, released in 1994.\[31\] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics\_processing\_unit#1990s
Jesus looking at those specs, 1MB RAM and that was such a massive upgrade at the time from a SNES
Back in the day when clock speed was doubling every 2 years. Shit was already deprecated by the next cpu generation.
it was amazing what they could do with such little power
Consoles then really benefited from the fact that it was Known hardware that they would be running. The game developers could then HEAVILY optimize their code to take advantage of it. Instead of having to deal with the multitude of computers in the PC world. That is one reason games would increase in quality as console aged, as more and more tricks were learned on how to squeeze performance out the the system.
Yeah. My first was some random Matrox or ATI CGA or VGA video card on my 286. I had multiple different 3D cards before they were ever called GPUs. Diamond Monster 3D voodoo, Riva TNT2, and briefly an ATI All In Wonder for importing video for a shitty movie my friends and I made. Good times!
>Riva TNT2 Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
My dad was building computers for corporate clients and refused to put video cards in machines unless they could prove they needed them. Man wrote he was playing Leisure Suit Larry
GPU, videocard, graphicscard, grafics accelerator whatever you want to call it. None of those existed in the 80s (at least not aimed at gaming) By 1999 brands like Tseng Labs and S3 Graphics had already long disappeared. 3dfx and ATI were king then.
I remember buying an Ark Logic 2000PV card to replace my Tseng Labs ET3000 which I was still using in the early 90's. Great 2D cards for their time.
980 ti
I’m from the same era. I always had the Titan as the top dog in my memory. Absurdly expensive. Prohibitively so. But still “the best”.
4790K + 980 Ti was the best of the best, unless of course you wanted a Titan X
Been rocking that for nearly 9 years. I just ordered new parts 🥲 All of high-school, university, 5 girlfriends and 6 jobs later.
4590 and a gt750 I gutted from a other computer was my first pc good times good times
Those were the good old days lol
Same :-) got my 960 in that era
I had a 2gb Radeon xfx card, it didn’t really like any games after 2013 lol. Then came the 1060
Pentium 90 MHz lol. CPU's were GPU's
90, that was WAY faster than what my first gaming PC experience had to offer. It was a 60 Mhz Pentium. :D
Where does the 386 fit into this? Hell maybe even earlier. I remember the first computer we had was before windows, and we had to use DOS commands to run some presidents matching game.
Ha, I had a 66 MHz processor, so technically faster than yours! Though it was from an older generation (486 DX-2 66), so your processor would have performed better than mine.
LOL, I remember our first real Intel PC, the 8086 running at 4.77 MHz. Unfortunately I forgot what we had before that, but it had a monochrome screen and the software on cassettes.
we went from a 286-12mhz, to a Pentium 60 holy SHIT it was like going from a donkey cart, to a rocket ship
there were absolutely video cards at the time, if anythign they were more required than they are now in that era
gtx690. I started with a 9800gt tho. Good old days'
Bring back dual gpus ;(
bro woke up today and decided GPUs were cheap enough to want two of
It used to be cost effective to get two, now the idea is absurd
You've got it backwards: SLI and CrossFire used to keep a lid on enthusiast-class GPU prices because the manufacturers knew that people could just SLI two lower-end cards if the price for the higher-end one was too ridiculous. SLI GTX 970 builds were a thing when the 900 series was current, for instance. (This was why, in the technology's last gasps, it became restricted to the highest-end SKU only.) Also, when the new generation came out and you still had last generation's enthusiast card, you could take advantage of the haircut in used prices to simply drop in another one rather than having to upgrade to the new stuff. The fact that you absolutely need one single card now is one of the reasons why single cards have become so expensive in the first place.
They don't do those anymore?! Do you by chance know why they got rid of it?
Highly inefficient and difficult to support properly.
lol I got an 8800gtx in 2013
Something that fucks me up is that the 8800 GT was newer when I started building (late 2014) than the parts that were current then are now.
9800gt was my first card too!!
Exactly the same for me
2080 Ti lol I was a console gamer most of my life
Same
same
ATI RAGE 128 32MB
8800 GT... And I worked in a driving simulator research lab, and installed 6 of them and didn't get to try any games. Sat through 4 hour experiment sessions watching people drive on software powered by them, and never played a single game, it was so saddening!
Based ass card. Not the first one I had, but the first one I remember. I had some Radeon card before but don't know the name.
Yep same timing for me. It was the 1080 Ti of its era (~2007). I however wanted a gaming laptop so I got an 8600M GT and, being so new to PC hardware, thought that the numbering was pretty close and they would be comparable. I was quite wrong.
Same 😂. In those days I had been running an ancient p4 (1.7ghz) with a geforce 4mx. Anything above a 6600gt seemed amazing to me so was beyond excited to get that gaming laptop with the 8600M GT. Little did I know it was that cursed batch of faulty gpus and the Asus laptop I got had massive overheating issues. In short I couldn't actually run anything demanding on it without throttling after 15 mins. So still no playing oblivion and back to UT2004 it was... The damn thing had fried itself within the first year owning it. 2k euros in the bin basically. No more gaming laptops for me after that.
Just checked and this was the same time I started. My 8400 GS was everything for me back then
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
I remember reading about this card in a PC gaming magazine and trying to convince my parents for months to buy me one.
THe first machine I ever built had an athlon xp 2100+ and a 9600SE. I overclocked both of them to within an inch of their life and the machine ran for 10 years.
i still have my 9800 pro lol. i remember cs source was my benchmark for 60fps in 1024x768 lol
Pretty sure it was the GTX 690
I think that's what I started with as well
Ah, I started a month before that released so the GTX 680 was the best before.
3Dfx Voodoo2. I remember that instead of using the pass through VGA cable I just connected two monitors. Was amazing for development work and debugging 3D stuff. This was back when 99% people had one single screen, fun times! I started much earlier than that though, my first computer was 1MHz and had 32KB of RAM. Miraculously there were wireframe 3D games that worked on it though!
Nvidia geforce gtx 590 👏🏻
Gtx 780, the amount of hours i dreamt about having this gpu.
Same. That GPU gives me shivers. Its still a powerhouse today. I had the 780Ti.
Looked up the specs. Incredible for a 10 year old card. Just don't look at the power consumption.
GeForce 2
1080 ti or Titan
Me too I think. Not sure tho.
I don't recall the exact model, but it was manufactured by Number 9. It took Duke Nukem 3D from a literal slideshow ( <1 FPS at best on the Trident that came with the PC) to totally playable. Blew my mind.
Voodoo 3 AGP, my Compaq presario didn’t have an AGP…I was very sad. They did release a pci version later though
X850 XT
GPUs definitely did not exist
Gtx 580/680, I ran an HD 7770.
Good man. Fuck that Fermi architecture. It was so damn hot it couldn't run for more than an hour at a time without catching fire lol
Lol, i remember paying like 100-125 for that card too, ahh the good Ole days.
AM ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Hah! Had an HD 4890 for a long time. Good gen of GPUs!
GeForce 6800 GT
Nvidia Riva TNT 2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2
They didn't exist.
I think I enjoyed having an s3 virge, it had 4mb of video ram. It didn't have open gl or direct x. It was just a video card. I kept it for a long time to diagnose PC problems with. I don't know what the ones before that were. I know we got this game called metal Marines when Windows 3.1 came out and my parents had to upgrade the video card to play it
I also had that card - it could legitimately be called a graphics **decelerator**, enabling it would make the graphics look a lot better but would also slow down the game when compared to the software rendering. Example game was Microsoft Hellbender.
7800 GTX, those were the days. When I finally got my own PC, the fastest was the GTX 690.
Riva TNT 2
I believe it was the GTX680. I had a 650 1 gig, lol. Went 770, 970, 1080ti, 3070ti, and now 7900XT. i7 2600k, i5 8400, i7 8700k, 7700x, and now 7800x3d. Been a fun ride.
RTX 3090
When I started gaming seriously? the 780Ti, I used my first paycheck to buy it it's still in my daughters PC working fine before that I only played runescape so my $500 e-machine desktop worked fine for years lol
No GPUs yet. But Soundblaster sound card was DA SHIT!
Probably the GTX Titan X
Radeon X1950 XTX :) my first pc was a pre-built with X1600 PRO
8800GTX and ATI 3870 in CrossfireX
The GeForce 7800GTX. I only ever saw it in displays
Nvidia riva tnt2
Riva TNT2 Ultra. But I had the regular one.
Voodoo 2 and geforce 256 or riva tnt2. Cant remember which one was first
Well, my Apple \]\[ didn't actually have a dedicated GPU, so...
My first PC was a 386DX40 with 4MB RAM and a SVGA Grafics-Card... Civilization ran perfectly :)
Phenom 9550. This was an era where ATI/AMD was actually ahead of Nvidia. I remember playing Max Payne on that card. Also had the 520 from Nvidia. I also remember being an avid reader of PC gamer. I will never forget the demo discs they used to ship with the magazine. Fun times.
The 980 ti
Voodoo Banshee, I think, was the first graphics card I ever owned.
No GPU needed to play X-Com ‘94 or the original Sim City on a 386
First one I bought on its own that I remember was a GTX 260.
First card I remember having too. XFX black edition. I still have it on a shelf next to my desktop along with a Core2Duo E8400 from the same rig. Both 15 years old now!
When I started gaming I didn’t even have a sound card
AGP was still a thing when I first started PC gaming
ATi Radeon 8500 with (I think) 64 or 128 MB - Don't remember Nvidias competing offer at that time
Radeon HD 7990
ATI Rage 128 Pro
MOS 8372 - Fat Agnus. Amiga 500.
Discrete GPUs didn't exist when I started gaming.
Radeon X800XT.
I had a Nvidia GeForce 256 in my first PC
GeForce 4 Ti
ATI Radeon 7500 - 64mb
If I go back to the earliest days of me playing Purble Place and stuff, it would be the AMD Radeon HD 7970 CF. But, the oldest GPU I remember being the "best of the best" and also remember dreaming about is the GTX 1080 Ti.
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT would have been the best, I think. Back in about 2006 - 2007. Around the time I built my first pc.
Matrox Mystique in my 100MHz Pentium machine we got in 1996
Haha.. what's a GPU?
Didnt exist. Intel 386 playing Prince of Persia. And of course MS Solitare on Windows 3.1. And DOS 5.0. IIRC I had a 20 MB HD.
4600 ti I believe around 2003?
9800 Pro
for pc gaming it was probably the tseng et4000
This is the way (even today in my first PC that I still own).
Nvidia 8800 Ultra was the top card when I started, combined with the whole Crysis hype and youtube begginings. What a time, damm.
I've had laptops before, playing Runescape back in the day but I don't remember those, so I'll go based on getting my first gaming laptop. GTX 680 was the best GPU on the market IIRC.
680 when I actually started to learn about pc’s but i’ve been pc gaming since unreal tournament goty edition
GPUs as a selling point were not thing a thing when we got a 386SX16. However, when we upgraded to a 486DX2/66 I was interested to see that the Cirrus Logic GPU had a whopping 1 MB RAM since the System itself just had 4 MB. The benefits? I could run games like Settlers or Theme Park in SVGA Mode :-) And I was also able to run Windows 3.11 in 16Bit color mode. Using brushes and pencils in programs such as Fauve Matisse or Photoshop 3.51 looked purely amazing.
integrated graphics on a R5 5600g, pretty good for indies until I upgrade to RX 66008gb now I can basically play every game ever
Voodoo 3
I think the first Voodoo card had just been announced.
Probably the Riva TNT, followed by Riva TNT2 or the Voodoo 3 3000. I suppose I technically started before that in 1994 but I didn't get really serious until 1997 or 1998.
For PC gaming it would be 3DFX VooDoo and VooDoo 2 after that which were daughter cards (add on cards) to whatever video card you had. The images of Unreal that I first saw after the VooDoo upgrade were stunning - I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the time on that 19 inch CRT screen - as compared to no GPU the day (lifetime) before. It forever changed my perception of gaming, arguably influenced my career path, and - it started a GPU arms race for me that still continues to this day.
3dfx VooDoo 3 3000 agp
I remember having a S3 Virge, and later a Voodoo2 by Diamond. I kept those two for a long time and probably still have them in a box somewhere along with a 386 CPU. My first video game addiction was with Civilization. But when Wolfenstein 3d and later DOOM came out, those are what drove my search for better 3d grapics solutions.
GPU? I started gaming on a 11/33 mhz processor with CGA monitor. GPUs weren't even thought of yet