Question Show and tell: Your all time favorite gpu?

[mopardude87]

I thought this may be fun to do, usually people post about what they have used but never which one has been their favorite. Maybe share the reason you got the gpu, did it max out a particular game or did it go beyond all your wildest expectations? Share a picture perhaps of your favorite? I think most of the older cards are just amazing, they have their own unique style which we may never see again.

For me it was this pretty much except i had a Evga model, i pulled this one out of a build i found last year which had like 20 odd hours on the disk . Back in the day this thing did 100 fps easy at 1920x1200 in BF2 and destroyed UT3/Bioshock. Took a 7700k/1080 ti/1080p setup to finally find a spiritual successor in a setup that just destroyed everything as equally good for its time period if not better then the Q6600/GTX285/1200p setup.

https://imgur.com/a/i48TdVN

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Favourite GPU?

I'm a bit torn between the 3dfx Voodoo Banshee, and the original Radeon 9700. On one hand, the Banshee had excellent 2D quality for its time, and full GDI+ acceleration. Wasn't half bad at 3D acceleration either. On the other hand, the 9700 was just viable for a really long time as it was more-or-less the "standard" implementation of DX9.

 

[mv2devnull]

Any card that works without problems is my favorite.

This, although Geforce 8800 GT(?) with its support for CUDA was a "big thing".


Way before there were GPUs, just graphics adapters, one system upgrade increased the resolution from 640x400 to 640x480 revealing the last 80 lines of a "test image" of adult nature. Revealing that the image was of adult nature ...

 

[mopardude87]

At the rate i am going, this 1080ti may actually end up as my favorite card in years to come. Overkill 1080p card, i did have do some some silly things with replacing stock fans with 120mm case ones cause one was causing a insane vibration cause a blade magically came off idk how but it did.

I guess if titles don't demand RTX, its prob gonna be enough till like next year. If i need anything its a seriously faster cpu then this 7700k, for 1080p which i like being at the 1080ti bottlenecked in everything from Crysis 1 demo right till BF5. Getting like a 100fps at least in everything with cpu bottlenecks. I guess i will need Comet/4000 series and one heck of a game to push the 1080ti and warrant it.

 

[ElFenix]

voodoo for sure. still have my canopus pure 3d with a whopping 6 MB of ram.

i should see if i can boot my pentium pro and play some quake or half life

 

[CZroe]

If we add most hated, definitely the FX5800 Ultra. Traded mine to Rollo for a ATI 9800pro, best trade I ever made.

At QuakeCon 2003 (sponsored by nVidia) I recall some guy smashed his ATI 9700 Pro for a GeForce FX... before we knew what a steaming turd it was. They gave him a hammer or something and had him do it on stage in front of a crowd.

Granted, the Doom 3 beta we got to see ran very well on GeForce FX-series.

 

[Sandalfo]

3DFX Voodoo 2 with Matrox Millenium.
My first true 3D GPU on PC in 1998 I think. Enabled me to finish Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for free in Hi-Res (800x600
Also played Half Life which was pretty neat for the time. But mostly i played emumators on my PC. Finished some PS1 games (Chrono Cross, SOTN, Legend of Mana, Parappa, etc.)
and also some SNES RPGs (Seiken densetsu 3, Super Mario RPG; Chrono Trigger, FF6, those were sooo good, irreplaceable memories)

 

[LOUISSSSS]

the AMD 1950XT and the Nvidia 8800GT!!!!!

 

[LOUISSSSS]

man that 9700 pro was a classic

 

[Shmee]

Hard to tell, had so many. But I think my choice may have to be the Sapphire Radeon 290 Tri X.

 

[Krteq]

Radeon 9700 Pro and Radeon X1800XL

Both unlockable and can be overclocked to oblivion

Owned both btw

 

[EXCellR8]

Still own a VisionTek HD4780, which to me was a monster of an upgrade in 2008 from what I had before (either a 8600GT or 7800GS). Superseded by 4890 but I don't think I owned one.

Cooling was garbage but great performance, albeit some really bad bugs with WinXP for whatever reason.

 

[mopardude87]

At QuakeCon 2003 (sponsored by nVidia) I recall some guy smashed his ATI 9700 Pro for a GeForce FX... before we knew what a steaming turd it was. They gave him a hammer or something and had him do it on stage in front of a crowd.

Granted, the Doom 3 beta we got to see ran very well on GeForce FX-series.

Gotta love those cherry picked games right? Yeah i found myself focusing on that one single absolute game, whichever gpu was faster in that game gets my cash. Ironically that ends up being Nvidia. I almost seem bias how often i pick nvidia but i chase performance at a given price point for my main titles and for BF till BF1/BF5 Nvidia was the choice for me.

 

[CZroe]

Gotta love those cherry picked games right? Yeah i found myself focusing on that one single absolute game, whichever gpu was faster in that game gets my cash. Ironically that ends up being Nvidia. I almost seem bias how often i pick nvidia but i chase performance at a given price point for my main titles and for BF till BF1/BF5 Nvidia was the choice for me.

Well, to be fair, thousands of us came to Texas to see/play Doom 3, so that's why it was being featured. It was less about making the sponsor's new/upcoming cards look good and more about giving the attendees what they came for. Doom series = id Software = Quake = QuakeCon

 

[Stuka87]

Well, to be fair, thousands of us came to Texas to see/play Doom 3, so that's why it was being featured. It was less about making the sponsor's new/upcoming cards look good and more about giving the attendees what they came for. Doom series = id Software = Quake = QuakeCon

And then thousands were all let down by Doom 3 being a tech demo formed into a claustrophobia inducing corridor simulator. So we all just went back to playing Q3A.

 

[Hans Gruber]

9700pro, 9800pro had both. Ti4200, 7950 and 8800GT.

 

[mopardude87]

Well, to be fair, thousands of us came to Texas to see/play Doom 3, so that's why it was being featured. It was less about making the sponsor's new/upcoming cards look good and more about giving the attendees what they came for. Doom series = id Software = Quake = QuakeCon

I could see the hype and the attraction to the idea. I usually am sticking to nvidia cards cause the games i play actively love nvidia over amd. That and well after having a issue with a amd card ever time it was in my rig. Nvidia always been plug n play outside of a stutter issue with a 670 and bf3.

If BF6 came out like that event you mention, and accompanying it was Big Navi playing it at some insane frame rate, i would prob get over my bias nvidia loving self and buy a Big Navi in a hurry. Same day i bet if i had the cash

 

[CZroe]

I could see the hype and the attraction to the idea. I usually am sticking to nvidia cards cause the games i play actively love nvidia over amd. That and well after having a issue with a amd card ever time it was in my rig. Nvidia always been plug n play outside of a stutter issue with a 670 and bf3.

If BF6 came out like that event you mention, and accompanying it was Big Navi playing it at some insane frame rate, i would prob get over my bias nvidia loving self and buy a Big Navi in a hurry. Same day i bet if i had the cash

Yeah. Everyone was pretty caught up in the moment and we all thought the FX series was going to be the latest and greatest. Hind sight is 20-20 though.

My friend was a huge AMD fan and he was there with his All-In-Wonder Radeon wondering why everyone was playing CS instead of Q3A. I avoided ATI back then after I saw Rage 128 and Radeon cards have issues in freakin' MSPAINT over multiple driver revisions but the 9700 Pro was the first from the Art X team and I already knew it was something special.

I was also a huge GameCube fan and the 9700 Pro was essentially an enhanced version of the GC's video architecture, now adapted to PCs. That's probably why I cringed even without knowing how bad the FX series was!

 

[mopardude87]

I avoided ATI back then after I saw Rage 128 and Radeon cards have issues in freakin' MSPAINT over multiple driver revisions but the 9700 Pro was the first from the Art X team and I already knew it was something special.

I was using friends Emachines which had a agp version of a Rage 128 pro. The thing crapped out and we stuck a 6200 Le in there. I swear i fondled more 6200 le cards then any other person with a 6200 le fetish ever could. That stinking card went into everything from my friends Emachines to my first ever pc..to my first gamer then one neighbors onboard crapped out and well take a wild guess what was put into their computer. You get 3 guesses, that's it.

I am like the omega lord of 6200 le fondlers, i ever had my hands on the pci version. I could start my own club like the Corvair club. Who the heck celebrates a car that overheats cause it decided it wanted to try and be a plane? Who wants to celebrate a gpu that actually used your own freaking system memory when the vram was gone like what the actual.

 

[CZroe]

I was using friends Emachines which had a agp version of a Rage 128 pro. The thing crapped out and we stuck a 6200 Le in there. I swear i fondled more 6200 le cards then any other person with a 6200 le fetish ever could. That stinking card went into everything from my friends Emachines to my first ever pc..to my first gamer then one neighbors onboard crapped out and well take a wild guess what was put into their computer. You get 3 guesses, that's it.

I am like the omega lord of 6200 le fondlers, i ever had my hands on the pci version. I could start my own club like the Corvair club. Who the heck celebrates a car that overheats cause it decided it wanted to try and be a plane? Who wants to celebrate a gpu that actually used your own freaking system memory when the vram was gone like what the actual.

That same friend started with an eMachine that had a Rage 128 (first Pentium III model with a DVD drive; was also available with a Voodoo3 1000).

I recall house-sitting for him and doing everything I could to get Unreal Tournament running as well as it the unpatched version did off the install disc. I finally found one DLL file that I could revert after updating UT and that would do the trick. The update patches updated a DLL that would suddenly use too much VRAM causing performance to tank.

After that he moved from the Rage 128 to the AIW Radeon to the AIW Radeon DV with Firewire, etc.

When we went to @LANta.con 2001 I got stuck using his Radeon while he used my Voodoo 3 3000 because my new Pentium 4 PC didn't support 3.3v AGP cards and the GeForce 3 I preordered wasn't quite available yet. He had literally thrown his eMachines board into the same kind of case Alienware was using with the "hydraulic" sliding door and put a fake Alienware badge on the front. I remember his faker machine getting all the attention with my card in it while mine was putting along with his Radeon that was essentially just two Rage 128 cards. I was a little jealous.

Didn't matter. I canceled my preorder and got my Visiontek GeForce 3 on launch day (first model they ever sold at retail and launched before competing GeForce 3 cards). Picked it up at Electronics Boutique for the cost of a PlayStation 2 ($299) and went to a big sponsored LAN party in Macon, GA. The big prize there was a GeForce 3 but I happened to be the only one there who already had one installed. Absolutely everyone there wanted to see my machine run 3DMark 2001 on "Windows Whistler Beta" IIRC. One dude had a hugely overclocked GeForce 2 Ultra that he paid much more for and it didn't even come close!

Actually got to play some Q3A even though most people there were playing Crimson Skies and watching DiVX bootleg copies of The Fast & the Furious.

Bawls everywhere. No one slept for days!

 

[Arkaign]

Didn't Nvidia "fix" FX with the late, rare, and stupidly expensive FX5900? The 5000 series was otherwise truly a monumental letdown after the righteous 4000 series (especially the value of the 4200ti! Had a Gainward that happily ran with 4600s, almost as good a deal as my hacked 9500 to 9700 L ram bargain cards lol).

Anyway, nothing will ever be as monumental as popping in the OG 4MB Voodoo1 and seeing GLQuake. The difference between that and everything that came before just was unspeakably huge. 640x480 fluid gaming with nice lighting as rockets flew down corridors was madness, and made the chunky graphics of PS1 and N64 look downright antiquated basically instantly.

 

[PingSpike]

voodoo for sure. still have my canopus pure 3d with a whopping 6 MB of ram.

i should see if i can boot my pentium pro and play some quake or half life

I still have my canopus pure 3d as well. It works too, been using it in pci passthrough stunts with pci to pci-e adapters recently. Surprised to see this card mentioned much.

Nothing special about my 4600ti, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. I really liked my x850xt card, although I can't really say why.

I was surprised how long my cheap HD4850 lasted. My wife played skyrim on it with no complaints, skyrim complained during startup it didn't have enough vram though.

 

[SPBHM]

I have a soft spot for my first proper GPU, the Geforce 2 MX 400, but I think the Radeon 9500 was pretty epic, with a 40% OC on the core and an 100% increase in working pipelines with a few clicks (and some slight modding for heat)... I could run the latest games in 2003 and things before Far Cry really well while it didn't cost me all that much, back in the day a lot of hardware got obsolete in a year so it was a new thing for me,

Didn't Nvidia "fix" FX with the late, rare, and stupidly expensive FX5900? The 5000 series was otherwise truly a monumental letdown after the righteous 4000 series (especially the value of the 4200ti! Had a Gainward that happily ran with 4600s, almost as good a deal as my hacked 9500 to 9700 L ram bargain cards lol).

Anyway, nothing will ever be as monumental as popping in the OG 4MB Voodoo1 and seeing GLQuake. The difference between that and everything that came before just was unspeakably huge. 640x480 fluid gaming with nice lighting as rockets flew down corridors was madness, and made the chunky graphics of PS1 and N64 look downright antiquated basically instantly.

they made it more competitive, but it still had the horrible shader 2.0 performance compared to ATI, and it was abandoned really fast.

still, some were good deals for a brief period of time (when most games were not really DX9 or Nvidia was "hacking" their way around it with driver optimizations in 2003 and early 2004), like some of the FX 5900SE/LE, and even the top cards could hang in there or beat the 9800 in some games, but overall... just no, R300/350/360 was much nicer than any NV30/35/38 thing.

 

[PingSpike]

One story I've heard of the FX series poor DX9 performance was that after nvidia played hardball with Microsoft on the xbox supplier contracts that Microsoft withheld information/support from nvidia forcing them to figure out DX9 mostly on their own. ATI was clearly the better choice for that generation and aged better, but I don't remember the FX series being useless since most games were 8.1 anyway around then.

 

[SPBHM]

the FX became useless after 2004/2005 when Nvidia stopped with their optimization efforts and more games adopted PS 2.0, the 9700 could run most games OK (at lower settings) for a couple of years more, the FX would just fail to launch many or run like a slide show, but in 2003/early 2004 indeed most games were DX8 or very light on DX9 and with Nvidia optimizing as much as they could, so for those that bought the FX in 2003 and quickly upgraded to the 6800 it wasn't really a big issue.
R300 can play Crysis (low settings), no FX can

but even in Half Life 2, you had to disable the cool water reflections (using DX8 reflections) to play it with a 5950Ultra while a Radeon 9600PRO (a way cheaper card) could run with it enabled with good performance.

still in a few demos and maybe games around it was clear that the FX was really slow at ps2.0 since 2003, when I tested Halo with the FX5900 I felt compelled to force dx8.1 mode because of the hit with DX9 mode (even if the title had pretty significant Nvidia driver optimizations), or remember that "real time hdr" dx9 demo from 2003, I tested it on the 9500 and then the FX5900... it was a huge difference,


people at the time mentioned that the PS 2.0 specs were very much built around the R300 GPU, and yes the Nvidia/MS relationship was at a low with issues with the Xbox deal and MS migrating to ATI for the 360 to be released in 2005, but I think it's fair to say Nvidia made mistakes, even the FX 5800 Ultra launch became a big joke because of the unexpected loud cooler (and unimpressive performance)

 

[CZroe]

Didn't Nvidia "fix" FX with the late, rare, and stupidly expensive FX5900? The 5000 series was otherwise truly a monumental letdown after the righteous 4000 series (especially the value of the 4200ti! Had a Gainward that happily ran with 4600s, almost as good a deal as my hacked 9500 to 9700 L ram bargain cards lol).

Anyway, nothing will ever be as monumental as popping in the OG 4MB Voodoo1 and seeing GLQuake. The difference between that and everything that came before just was unspeakably huge. 640x480 fluid gaming with nice lighting as rockets flew down corridors was madness, and made the chunky graphics of PS1 and N64 look downright antiquated basically instantly.

Yeah. I couldn't afford one at the time but the difference was jaw-dropping.

I regret selling my Quantum 3D Obsidian2 Voodoo2 SLI card at that same QuakeCon 2003. It was a single-card SLI. Also sold my Diamond Monster Z100 Voodoo Banshee. So many memories of running GLQuake on those!