What was your most awesome video card purchase ever ?

[Bateluer]

Probably my first one, the Voodoo 3. First one I could afford on fast food wages, staggering improvement from generic pos.

Geforce 256 DDR was pretty awesome too.

 

[SirPauly]

Diamond Monster 3D. Experiencing 3D acceleration for the first time was mind blowing.

Indeed! Playing Tomb Raider was so much fun! What gamer didn't have an odd crush with Lara?

Honorable mentions:

Voodoo 5: 3dfx' RGSSSAA: Rotated Grid Spatial Super-Sampled Anti-Aliasing was so far superior to OGSSAA: Order Grid Super-Sampled -- and sad that the industry and market place wasn't ready or didn't accept it. The blending of the 22-bit-color through the T-buffer translated into one didn't have to use the performance of 32-bit color. Sadly the market place disagreed with the VSA-100 core.

ATI Radeon 9700: Did bring sparse grid AA and quality patterns for multi-sampling. Even though the filtering: Anisotropy -- it was based on angle dependency but they moved to trilinear based and was solid while moving.


ATI x1900XTX Crossfire: Not really for AFR but for Super AA: With titles exhibiting more transparency artifacts, texture temporal shimmering, and shader aliasing -- the x10 and x14 settings were essential but why? These modes had a virtual free x2 RGSSAA: Rotated Grid Super-Sampled Anti-Aliasing and could be combined with transparency adaptive. For Example: World of Warcraft: Exhibited noticeable texture shimmering and aliasing, was riddled with Alpha Test Transparency textures. The game was a cinematic gaming experience with Super-AA. What ever the frame-rate was with x4 MSAA and x2 transparency samples with one card, one could have the same frame-rate with x8 MSAA+x2 RGSSAA+X6 distinct transparency samples with Super-AA.

 

[Blue_Max]

Mine was the Canopus Pure3D from 3dfx... 6MB vs. the standard 4MB.

The next big WOW moment was the Radeon 9700 which was another giant game-changing leap!

 

[Creig]

The most memorable card for me was definitely the ATi 9500 (non-Pro). I was one of the lucky ones who was able to soft-mod my card into a 9700. And it overclocked well to boot. To this day, I haven't owned a video card that could come close to the performance/dollar that I got out of that little 9500. Even after I upgraded, it kept happily humming along in my daughter's computer. It simply wouldn't quit.

 

[cbrunny]

My first 7970, for no other reason than it was the first time I purchased a serious video card for gaming. It opened up a whole new world for me.

 

[Insomniator]

Probably a GTX470 years ago when I was really into gaming...

My 7950 certainly performed like a champ and was such a good deal... same for my current 780 but I just don't have much interest in the kinds of games these cards excel at anymore

I could run Dota and SC2 on whatever card I had 5 years ago.

 

[Aristotelian]

Probably my first one, the Voodoo 3. First one I could afford on fast food wages, staggering improvement from generic pos.

Geforce 256 DDR was pretty awesome too.

I bought a Riva TNT 2 Ultra, and then upgraded to a Geforce DDR. I can remember competing with people running Voodoo 2s in SLI, and one of them yelling at me that turning on 32 bit colour in Quake 3 arena did nothing with the graphics (he couldn't). I showed him what the hovering quad damage symbol looked like with 32 bit colour on, and it was different (it looked way better on my PC than his), then I stomped him something like 62 to -4 (yes, -4) in Quake 3 Arena 1v1, because he kept trying to take me down with in your face rocket launcher blasts without realizing I had stuffed up my armour and health more than he had.

Probably my most epic gaming related video card purchasing moment. The good old days.

These days I'm still rocking GTX 580s in sli at 1440p, but I'm itching to upgrade - wife says not before 2016...

 

[XBoxLPU]

Probably would have to be when I got my 6800 Ultra for a scorching deal of $400 and upgrading from a ATI 9700 Pro.

Oddly enough I have yet to spend $400 for a video card since that purchase.

 

[krumme]

Tseng 4000 2D accelerator card from the start of the 90ties, because going from no acceleration in word/whaever with slow moving pages of text !- argggg - to 3000% the speed made the difference for productivity.

Good for games also

 

[hawtdawg]

Voodoo 2

 

[pauldun170]

Its a toss up between
Geforce ti200 - First time I could actually game on my PC without wtaching a slideshow
ATI 9700pro - Gaming like a boss for the first time ever.
Everything after that has been incremental improvements

 

[Attic]

9700Pro

That let me run UT2003 at 1600x1200 with 4xAA at >60fps on my Athlon XP 2100+ oc'd to 2.2ghz I believe.

That was the biggest "oh wow" moment for me. 1600x1200 on my old Sony CRT (75hz iirc) was bonkers. Before that it was 1158x762 (or someting) at 100hz and I ran a Geforce 3 Ti200 (watercooled and oc'd beyond Ti500 speeds).

I feel like I should have been strapped into my computer chair before firing up the 9700Pro, it felt that fast.

 

[XBoxLPU]

Wait, a GeForce 3 needed water cooling? Bonkers

 

[Lorne]

worst was the Matrix (Top mdl at the time), It choked on everything and crashed all the time from bad drivers.

First big WOW! improvement was the 3DFX monster 1 with that massive 2megs of ram.
After that was the change over to TNT2 htnl was awesome (for a cheap card)
Replaced that with Canopus top TNT2 card paired with the monster 1 and I was a happy camper.

The introduction of GForce was a small wow, But nothing since the day of 3DFX.

 

[Geforce man]

nVidia geforce 3 ti 200. Waited in line on black friday to get it 50% off. From 199 down to 99$. The ti500 was way to spendy @ 299$. My ti 200 overclocked to above ti500 speeds anyways, as I had the (i can't remember which) ram that was better for overclocking on it. Enabled me to play games @ max settings for YEARS. That, and it was the first videocard that I purchased seperate to one that was included with a pre-built PC. (It also went in my first ever total self build custom PC).

That'd be it for me!

Runner up: geforce 256 DDR (32meg card! woo!) that came with my p3 600 HP machine with 128mb SDR memory! I too had the same experience as the above poster, my friend and I who played Q3A together fired it up and he was amazed at how much better the game looked with 32bit color and all the settings maxed out. That little beast could max the game out @ over 99FPS!!

 

[thilanliyan]

Probably my 6950, with which I mined BTC for the first time. It still blows my mind that I made money from a video card lol.
Honourable mention goes to my 9600XT as well, with which I played HL2, and which I actually got for PoP:Sand of Time (which required a DX9 card).

 

[Mopetar]

Probably the 8800. It was a monster for its time and still performed admirably years later, albeit not at the highest settings.

 

[Leyawiin]

Going from a 7800 GS AGP to a new rig with an 8800 GTX. Will never forget the massive boost in FPS in Oblivion.

 

[Corporate Thug]

ti4200/9700pro/8800gt were my faves.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Since many mention the Voodoo2, I'll just throw an oddball and mention my Voodoo Banshee...

Almost unbeatable 2D quality for the time and even higher performance in some situations then the Voodoo2. Didn't need a dedicated 2D card too... :thumbsup:

 

[Golgatha]

Creative Voodoo 2 8MB, Voodoo 3 16MB, Gainward GeForce 3 64MB, Radeon 9800 (OCed to > 9800 XT speeds), 8800GT, GTX 275 SLI, GTX 570 SC, and the first Titan I bought were all pretty noticeable upgrades for me.

 

[wilds]

My favorite was my 6800 GT which I still have in my old rig. That played all my favorite games. Least favorite is a tie between the integrated IGP in this single core 2ghz celeron laptop that could barely play hd videos, and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M which ran hot and inefficient while disabling the intel igp thanks to Lenovo... I loved that 1 hour battery life....

 

[fastman]

Either an old Matrox or Voodoo as others had said as it brought 3D for the first time to the screen for me.

 

[mojothehut]

My first real video card purchase, Voodoo 3 3500 (still running, used for glide games) :awe: :awe: :awe:

Geforce 2 GTS Pro
Geforce 3 Ti 500
Geforce 4 4200
ATi 9700 pro (Ran Doom 3 like UBER)
Geforce 6800 Ultra
Geforce 9800gt
AMD 7950, current.

 

[Annisman*]

Let me see if I can remember my upgrade history.

EVGA 7800GT 256
HIS X1950XTX
PNY 8800GTX 768
BFG 9800GX2
Asus 4870X2>>> 4870X2+48701GB Tri Fire
8800GTS 512
2X ATI 58701GB CF
2X GTX 460 1GB SLI
2X GTX 570 SLI
2X GTX 580 SLI
2X GTX 670 4GB SLI>>>> 3X GTX 670 4GB Tri SLI
2X GTX Titan 6GB SLI >>>> GTX Titan 6GB
GTX 980 4GB

Phew !