What is the best video card ever made?

[Ferocious]

The 9700? The TNT? The V1? The Savage? The i740? The Riva 128? The V2?

Another one?

What do you think?

 

[Sunner]

Im torn between the Voodoo2 and the TNT1.

Voodoo2 cause it kicked ass all over the place in it's time, oh the memories

And the TNT1 cause it was the first combo 2D/3D card that was actually very powerful, sure there were Verite cards and such, but IMO they just didn't have the required power.

 

[Lonyo]

Kyro II
Deferred rendering technique, something that in principle is an amazingly good idea.

 

[holdencommodore]

Yeah, the STMicro Kyro chip, cartainly one of the more innovative chips. My one is running well on my Duron 1333 rig.. I'm looking foward to the PowerVR Series 5 chip, which should show itself later this year.

Cheers

 

[FuManStan]

Voodoo 2.

 

[pillage2001]

Definitely the Voodoo2. It was a huge leap.

 

[PliotronX]

Bitboys' Glazed3D!

 

[Detselom]

voodoo 1

seeing quake one go from 320x200 in software to 640x480 in opengl blew my mind when layed eyes up'on that.

 

[Brian48]

Voodoo2

 

[bgeh]

Definitely the Voodoo 2
I have one in my older rig and it still works perfectly(considering the price i paid for it when it was new)

 

[SpeedyGonzales]

Definitely Voodoo 1. Seeing the improvement it did to the visual quality of Tomb Raider over my Matrox Mystique was simply breathtaking. The magic was "texture filtering" (if I remember it correctly). Voodoo 2 was a cool card, but only faster than the Voodoo 1, however Voodoo 1 was a quantum leap.

Today I would say that the Radeon 9700 pro has the potential to become my new all-time champion. It is the first time, that you can play 32bit color, high-resolution, AA and AF with decent framerates for any existing game. It is the first time since Voodoo 1, that I have experienced more than an incremental improvement to 3D image quality (I am not talking about the signal quality here).

Cheers
Speedy

 

[sash1]

Th best card evar is the Kyro II. It's use of DMR is amazing. If only it had a TnL engine...

Second behind that is the VooDoo2. It was revolutionary.

~Aunix

 

[ET]

I've always been partial to the Rage Pro. First chip to include multitexturing, first chip to include texture compression, first chip with DVD acceleration. Of course, none of its advanced features were available for use outside the CIF API, which nobody used, and it had that lack of alpha filtering problem and crappy drivers. But on technical merits I still think it was great.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: FuManStan
Voodoo 2.

Agreed. I still remember my jaw dropping when I fired up Unreal the first time on my Diamond Monster II 8MB card (almost $300 new when I bought it :Q ). It was unbelievable. I've been an addicted gamer ever since.

I loved that card...

 

[EdipisReks]

voodoo1. i remember seeing quake in software, and being blown away by the reaslism. then i saw it running on a voodoo1. i still haven't fixed my jaw from when it dropped to the floor.

 

[ET]

I had that "real 3D is great" feeling with a ViRGE, when I first saw Tomb Raider running with bilinear filtering. After that, nothing could impress me.

 

[Sunner]

I don't see why so many people pick the Kyro II of all cards.

Granted, it's deferred rendering was very impressive, but in the end, that didn't make it more than a good budget card.
It competed with GTS's in some cases, but ultimately the GTS remained the high end card to have, until the Ultra came out, and then the GF3.
The K-II never had much of an impact despite it's impressive technology.

 

[Peks]

voodoo 3 for having both 2d and 3d :-D

 

[Schadenfroh]

3dfx Rampage, so far ahead of its time, it was never released. final testing had begun on it right when 3dfx shut down. it probably would have competed very well with a TI4200, except it would have been out a long time before it.

 

[NEVERwinter]

voodoo1 for the first time 3D card.... then TNT for a real 2D/3D combo

 

[pukemon]

I remember in my sophomore year of college (1998) the "1337" gamers used TNT (for 2D and D3D) + 2 Voodoo2's in SLI (for GLide)... and left their cases open at all times... now that was a combo...

 

[nippyjun]

SLI Voodoo2's (12 meg version).

It's funny. I had a pair of the 8 meg versions and sold them to get a pair of the 12 meg versions. These days we talk about 128 megs on one card. I didn't see any performance difference with 12 over 8 megs/card. But I just wanted bragging rights to more memory.

 

[glugglug]

<sarcasm>i815 of course with Hercules MDA being a close runner up</sarcasm>

Seriously Voodoo (the original) as it was far more amazing for its time than anything today.
There are games that came out 6 years later that run 100% smooth on it (just not under Win2K/XP because there are no Voodoo1 drivers for those OSes to this day).

Voodoo2 never impressed me. TNT was already out shortly before Voodoo2, had much better image quality from better color depth, and was a best of breed 2D card as well rather than being 3D only. Why on Earth 3dfx waited so long to move from 16 to 32 bit color is beyond me.

 

[Trevelyan]

Well my first OpenGL card was the TNT1, and that was the first time I was able to play Quake2... so I'd go with that.

A $90 investment that changed my life forever

 

[Afro000Dude]

My VooDoo3 3000 that I bought shortly after the fall of 3dfx for $70 is still running great after 4 different computers and after the recent death/paralysis of my ti4400.