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Best Videocard of All Time

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i played games on my parents mac way back when, when the games came on a huge floppy disk, haha. wow, about 7years ago, we got a dell and it had a vodoo 3 on it i think if not that, then a vodoo 2. Blew my mind to see the graphics. amazing. i was able to play games on it for a few years and it held its own, i still play games on it, solitare, and such now...the new card that did it for me now is the 6600gt series with the GDDR3. awsome card for the price. All in all, the vodoo card open the market for highstream vid cards...atari is the best🙂
 
1) voodoo 1/2

with glquake, v1 literally changed gaming visuals and what we expected from game gfx. v2 added sli which was... expensive, but cool, not to mention very fast.

2) geforce 256

tons of features, and rewrote the performance criteria by which all cards were measured - all in a single card.

3) tie (chronological order, not significance)

radeon 9700 pro - dominated anything which came before it (and several cards which came after)

geforce 6 series - again almost doubling performance, pluse adding a host of new features (one in particular which as broken - shame on you nv)

ati x800 series - while playing it safe in the feature/innovation dept, as with the gf 6 series, almost doubling performance (the lack of xt parts was pathetic - shame on you ati)

 
Originally posted by: Rollo
This isn't even really a question, the 6800Ultra 512MB is the "best card of all time", so far.

Sometime this year the R520 or G70 will replace it.
Click to expand...

No, you could argue its the best PERFORMING card of all time. Not to mention that technically it isn't even the best performing since the X850XT PE is faster. But the latest thing doesn't necessarily make it the best ever.

It would be like saying the 2005 Suzuki Hayabusa is the best Motorcycle ever made, just because it is the fastest production motorcycle ever made (which it is BTW) .
 
Radeon 8500 for me. Not so much the card itself, but it came bundled with Counter-Strike which ate up a couple years of my life 😛
 
Voodoo2, just ahead of the original voodoo card, for rescuing the world from software rendering (I won't go back - you can't make me!!!).

Voodoo1 was the original, but the voodoo2 was almost as revolutionary, and handled virtually everything game designers came up with for another 3-4 years - and that's without having 2 of them running together!
 
Orchid Kelvin 64, but only because it was the first card I ever bought and the speed increase over whatever the hell it was inside that SX33 was phenomenal.
 
Originally posted by: ZimZum
Originally posted by: Rollo
This isn't even really a question, the 6800Ultra 512MB is the "best card of all time", so far.

Sometime this year the R520 or G70 will replace it.
Click to expand...

No, you could argue its the best PERFORMING card of all time. Not to mention that technically it isn't even the best performing since the X850XT PE is faster. But the latest thing doesn't necessarily make it the best ever.

It would be like saying the 2005 Suzuki Hayabusa is the best Motorcycle ever made, just because it is the fastest production motorcycle ever made (which it is BTW) .
Click to expand...

1. It's faster than the X850XT PE at some games as a single card
2. It offers SM3, a more advanced version of DX9 than any other card
3. It offers EXR HDR and soft stencil shadows
4. It offers SLI capability

Of those four points, the only one a X850 XT PE can lay claim to is "faster at some games", which I hardly think qualifies it for the "best card in history. History is full of cards that were "faster at some games" (e.g. Voodoo3, Voodoo 5) whose lacking feature sets made them a questionable value.
 
Originally posted by: Rollo
Originally posted by: ZimZum
Originally posted by: Rollo
This isn't even really a question, the 6800Ultra 512MB is the "best card of all time", so far.

Sometime this year the R520 or G70 will replace it.
Click to expand...

No, you could argue its the best PERFORMING card of all time. Not to mention that technically it isn't even the best performing since the X850XT PE is faster. But the latest thing doesn't necessarily make it the best ever.

It would be like saying the 2005 Suzuki Hayabusa is the best Motorcycle ever made, just because it is the fastest production motorcycle ever made (which it is BTW) .
Click to expand...

1. It's faster than the X850XT PE at some games as a single card
2. It offers SM3, a more advanced version of DX9 than any other card
3. It offers EXR HDR and soft stencil shadows
4. It offers SLI capability

Of those four points, the only one a X850 XT PE can lay claim to is "faster at some games", which I hardly think qualifies it for the "best card in history. History is full of cards that were "faster at some games" (e.g. Voodoo3, Voodoo 5) whose lacking feature sets made them a questionable value.
Click to expand...

You know what you should do to this thread? Turn it into another SM3 debate and get the fanboy traffic in. That would be awesome and totally in the spirit of this thread.
 




X850xtpe is faster than the 6800ultra period. Even the x800xtpe was faster but not by much.


Either way, the gforce 2 was the best card nvidia ever made for me.
 
Originally posted by: eunsang
gotta love my gf4 mx400 64mb. still plays cs with 2005fp.
Click to expand...

i have to ask though, why did you buy a 2005fp when you have a gf4 mx400 64MB? the money you spent on the lcd could of been more wisely spent on a new graphics card?
 
Voodoo 2 because Q2 went from pixelated crap to OMFGBBQ!!!
And my GF4 Ti4200 cause I still use it today... runs GuildWars smooooth and beautiful.

Oh, and for ATi I suppose the 9700 Pro as the 9x series of cards seemed to be a big turning point for ati, and the 9600 Pro 256mb was a KILLER value card.
 
1.) Voodoo 2, sorry, only thing that touches this for performance of its time is the next card.
2.) GeForce 256, the first GPU, I was running my 32mb DDR card until last year when I found out HL2 wasn't going to work well on it.
 
Wow... cool topic.

I have to say, my Gainward ti 4200 golden sample was the best card i ever owned. Still own it today, as it sits in my wifes computer, and STILL runs every game i throw at it, HL2, Doom 3, etc. For the price to me, it was the greatest card ever for price vs performance. It was also the 1st card i ever got that came with an OC program, and the slidng bars were just so easy to OC to your hearts content. That card will always hold a special place for me.

That being said.... my other 2 honorable mentions were the GF 2... the 1st video card that really dazzled me, showed how pretty gaming was going to get...

and a little honorable mention to my PNY 6800 vanilla, after unlocking and oc'ing, and getting it the day after thanksgiving for $199.... it fast becoming like the ti 4200 for me, an amazing performer for an amazing price.... but like any 1st love, it cant replace my 4200 🙂

 
hmm....guess Geforce 256DDR. totally changed the picture of games and started the DX era. 9700pro was also quite a leap in performance but it did not revolutionalize anything. ppl mainly cribbed about it since it dethroned nvidia who seemed unbeatable.
the voodoo 2 was also a monster in its time!!
 
I would have to say the Voodoo2...it was a great card, redefined what the original voodoo could do plus it was SLI compatible....especially for ppl that didnt have a chance ti use the original voodoo, it was like opening up a whole new world of gaming...remember GLQuake anyone?? 🙂
 
Voodoo 2 series. Bar None. True SLI and the games didn't need to know about it or need any kind of profiling or monkeying around, they just ran better pure and simple. I had 2 Diamond Voodoo 2 boards and ran Quake 2 at the time "screaming fast" @ 1024x768 and at the time that was a high res for a shooter.
 
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