First game you had to upgrade to play? What did you buy?

[Kristijonas]

some crappy video card/integrated vga(?) was upgraded to nvidia 7300gs. For Deus Ex. And... it became playable even in full screen on highest resolution! lol.
Also 2gb ram to 3gb ram for gothic 3. Saw visible 5% fps improvement. GPU still bottlenecked.

But those upgrades were made by my father and not directly with any games in mind.

 

[AstroManLuca]

I can only remember one game where I wanted the game first and then upgraded in order to play it. That would be Rebel Assault, a terrible Star Wars game that required a CD ROM drive and "recommended" a joystick. Funny thing is it was just a "move the crosshairs around and shoot target boxes" game so not only was a joystick not necessary, it actually made the game harder. I just used the arrow keys instead. But I'm still glad I got the joystick because it allowed me to play F/A-18 Hornet, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter.

The closest modern occurrence was upgrading from a 3850 to a 4870 partly to improve performance in Company of Heroes. But that was just one minor factor in my upgrade. Normally I just upgrade when I start having to turn down the settings too much in order to get decent performance and then pick up newer games accordingly.

 

[SpunkyJones]

I believe it was Wing Commander III, needed to upgrade my RAM.

 

[TheSlamma]

Added a VGA vid card to my 386DX to play Kings Quest 5 in VGA after sending in Disk 1 of the EGA version to Sierra On-Line

 

[crownjules]

It was Doom.

My dad needed to add 8MB of RAM to our 486/33 for it to run properly. The upgrade also included a CD-ROM and Soundblaster.

 

[Josh123]

I think my dad upgraded our ram from 8mb to 16mb so I could play Armored Fist 2. I think it was aout $100 at the time but after that I was hooked on PC games. Figher Ace, Red Alert, Warcraft, and so on.

 

[Rhezuss]

Can't recall for what game but I remember when I replaced my Diamond Monster 2 3DFX (or something like that) for a GeForce 256!!!!!!

Good ol' days!

 

[Mandres]

Think I picked up a GeForce3 ti200 in order to play the Desert Combat mod for BF:1942. Money well spent!

 

[Nohr]

I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB RAM back in late 2004 specifically for Star Wars Galaxies. Before the upgrade it would take 20-30 seconds to load Mos Eisley every time I made a trip to town.

Around the same time I replaced my basic Logitech mouse with a MX510 when I got in to a UT2004 clan. I'm still using it!