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Question what was your first legit video card?

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spaceman

spaceman

Lifer
?
mine was the 16mb voodoo banshee end of 1998 irrc
played moto madness on it and was blown away, well, i was impressed at least
hbu?
 
3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI. It was a major upgrade from S3 accelerator card (no 3D) which came integrated in my old Compaq Presario lol.
 
Mine was GeForce 3 (the original one, not the Tis) from Asus. It came with a funky 3D glass (active I believe), way ahead of its time. If you find today's 3D technology bad, imagine what its like then.

The card itself was great though. Those days even flagship gaming card had a reasonable size and not monstrously huge like today.
 
My first real 3D card was a Riva TNT 16mb back in 1999, Asus brand which came with a free game - Incoming. My friends were so jealous.
 
I remember having a Matrox Millenium.
I think I had a 3DFX card at some point.

Starting in 1996 I was doing Pro/E CAD work on $20,000 HP workstations and I remember when the original GeForce256 came out because I could now do equivalent CAD work on my home PC at a fraction of the price. That card was a game changer and practically killed the non-windows workstation market.

-T
 
Riva TNT 16mb was my first I believe.
Probably on a Pentium II slot 1 MB with a 300 mhz Pentium II Deschutes.
 
I had went through a couple, S3 Virge rings a bell. First I would consider legit is probably a Rage 128 Pro 16MB. Great times with Half Life. Held on to that way too long before getting a Geforce 3 Ti200. Night and day it was.
 
Think I had an Nvidia TNT originally in an HP machine, which I later upgraded myself to a Voodoo 4 4500.
 
In the very very early days, I had some Tseng ISA 16-Bit card. 512Kbit I think, expandable with the little dip Vram chips to 1Mbit. Got it at a computer store which I no longer remember the name of, and pieced together junk I bought for cheap at First Saturday into a 386SX PC, the first real x86 I ever owned. I have forgotten most of the things I had back then because I was always flipping things and changing things. I do remember buying a 20MB IDE Hard Drive from the guy in far north Dallas who had the utterly insane junkyard of PC stuff, he always wore an FBI jacket and never really said anything to anyone. The drive was bad :'( As a 17yo paying his own rent/etc on a Target minimum wage job, it hurt even though it was only like $15 or something. I also distinctly remember
 
Paying about $90 for 4 1MB 30-pin (gold pins at that) Ram SIMMs, which was a really good deal at the time. Soft Warehouse (the originator of CompUSA later on) was in town, and $200+ was the normal rate for 4MB at the time. It's astounding how expensive everything was back then. In roughly fall of 1995, I and a friend had our very first client(s). They were called the Rainone brothers, and they worked for various Hollywood productions over the years for creature and practical effects. They lived in this grand maze of a house in Ft Worth, and they had an old, mostly dead Compaq 386 Deskpro. We built them a DX4/100 generic PC, put in new HDD, and added the old 80MB drive as a spare for their files.
 
But, they still needed a monitor, their old ~12" MGA screen was definitely not going to cut it, so they peeled off some very old dollar bills and sent us to get what we could. The best we could find was a $300(?) or so 17" Packard Bell VGA monitor. I remember the dot pitch was absolutely horrible, like .54 or something. But at 800x600@75hz it did the trick. Tried 1024x768 as well, but they preferred the 800x600 for easier visibility without glasses. It sounds really stupid now, but at the time, a good 17" was $700+, and even mediocre no name ones were usually $400+ if you were lucky. I had bought a 15" ViewSonic for $250 and felt I got a steal on it.

Edit : please forgive my series of posts here, I'm on mobile, and it loses its mind afteccccer
 
Diamond Viper Riva TNT2 16mb, with a p2 300mhz and 32mb ram if I remember right...... a very long time ago lol
 
3dfx Voodoo2. I still have it stored away in a box with my 3C905-TX NIC and my US Robotics 56k Courier external modem (along with other miscellany from the era).
 
ATI Ega Wonder !

Back in '86/'87 as a high school student, could not afford a EGA/VGA monitor.
The EGA Wonder ! let you plug into a monochrome monitor and run EGA/VGA games.

I remember purchasing a $10 game from Waldenbooks, some horrible baseball game. It wouldn't boot on the card.
Contacted ATI in Canada, and they sent me a new EEPROM to install in the card with a return carrier for the old one.

That customer service, as a youth, is likely why I went on to buy the VGA Wonder !, Rage, 9700, 6850, 7850, 3900, 480 and 580 graphics cards.
 
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