Once upon a time, you were poor and ran this game that was so slow...

[Captante]

Mechwarrior II Mercenaries on #9 S3 Virge 2mb vs a Canopus 6mb Voodoo 1. (OMFG night and freaking day!)

The other really serious eye-opening bump in performance in a single game that I recall at the moment was Oblivion on my PNY 6800GT vs a Sapphire X1900XTX.

The move from that same X1900XTX to an EVGA GTX-8800 was a bigger kick in the pants hardware-wise but I wasn't playing anything that I recall being seriously effected at the time.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I don't think I can say I was poor, but I did blow all my money from my first job out of university on a brand new pc from future shop. If I remember right the PC was $1400 CAD and the CRT Monitor was another $300CAD.

This was in 2001. I knew nothing about PCs. It was a Pentium 4 1.4ghz machine. The problem is that it came with 128mb of Rambus Ram and a TNT2 with 32mb of VRAM.

I tried to play Morrowind and it would take about 3 minutes to load a scene that was around 10 frames per second.

Once I encountered that I decided to do some research and realized that the CPU was new but GPU was already a 2 year old card. After spending all of that money on the PC I had no extra money for a new gpu and more ram.

Doh. A year later, I ended up buying an xbox and playing Morrowind on that.

Ugh I spent through the nose on an Athlon XP + Radeon 8500 system back then and it felt like it aged so poorly and sent me straight to console for a generation when the 360 came out even though I was making way better money by then.