I remember when the EGAs came about. Damn, it was like stepping into the future. But I didn't have a color monitor so it didn't matter. I was probably more envious than your friend.
I attempted to upgrade such a card and were suggested the Geforce FX 5200.
I was so hyped. After finally installing the games I always wanted to play I ad to realize: This passive cooled card supported DX9 on paper but its performance was worse.
It crushed me back then and since then I have never bought a desktop PC part ever again.
But then recently I was gifted an old rig from a friend. Put a Readon RX 6700 (or so) in it.
So my first actual graphics card is this radeon!! :)
Buddy, if you read this: Thank you again, much love. You are an awesome beeing.
I got a 3DFX voodoo as soon as they came out. GL quake was mind-blowing.
I bought a Riva TNT
Then a GeForce 2
Then a Radeon 9000
Then for a bunch of years I just moved into laptop after laptop with discrete GPUs.
Now I still have a 1080 and a 2070 doing a little bit of light AI work and video transcoding for me. But I'm still relying on crappy laptop GPUs for all my gaming. They're good enough.
My prime gaming years were self moderated by only going to internet cafés as a strict rule to manage my time. I spent a lot of time at cafés, but nowhere near as much as I would have played if I had my own hardware. It wasn't the money. It was about the time management and a large part of how I owned my first auto body shop business.
I remember because it was my first PC that I got for myself. I was an intern at a small computer repair shop and that's where I learned how to build computers.
Before that I only played on my parents PC and afterwards I switched to Mac.
Nvidia Riva 128 AGP with 4 megs of ram. I will never ever forget when they released hardware accelerated opengl drivers and I played Quake GL for the first time. It was hitting 120fps and looked absolutely beautiful compared to the software rendered games I'd played up to that point.
Technically, an ATI Radeon 9800 as that was my first custom built computer in 2003. However, the ATI Rage IIc was the gpu inside my first desktop computer, an iMac G3 in 1998. But the first one I used was the VGC 12-bpp palette graphics of the Apple IIgs, where I was first introduced to computer games and upgrading the accelerator cards and memory to play new games with more demanding requirements in 1994.
Dont remember the details anymore, but I remember something called "Voodoo".
Also, connecting 2 different types of graphics cards with a cable on the outside for some reason.
I was about to get one of those used (only difference is it being the 8GB version) but at the end it turned out it didn't work so I bought a new RX 6600 instead
First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.
ATI Rage something on AGP bus, no 3D acceleration, certainly no Openssl etc, but it had hardware MPEG2 decoding, you know, for DVD
My parents later bought me GeForce 2 MX400, in 2007 i bought a new PC with my own money (first salary) with GeForce 7300GT, later upgraded it to 9600GT, then Radeon HD 7770, GTX 1050 and now RX 6600, it's a Theseus's PC at this point
Upgraded my highschool family desktop I took to college with a GeForce 8800 GT , used until I build a new pc with a Radeon 7970 GHz edition, which was replaced with a rx580 after the card passed away from light coin poisoning. Desktop is now running unRAID and my new main rig has a gtx 3070 in.
A Monster 2 8 MB. I remember being angry at my parents that they didn't get me the 12 MB version. But I couldn't formulate my anger because I didn't understand the difference between system and GPU RAM.
Still, I was amazed how quickly weapon switching now was in Jedi Knight. And Unreal always looked thr best in Glide. And the included rotating donut demo with bump mapping was awesome! A feature that would go on to be touted as the revolutionary hot new shit even 20 years later.
an ancient card with a colorful box from 3dfx.
I think it was a voodoo 2, but not one that came bundled with creative soundblaster.
Yes, we needed another physical card for sound.
If by graphics card you mean 3D hardware acceleration, then it was a Canopus Pure 3D. It was equivalent to the first Voodoo add-in card but IIRC it had 6 MB of RAM instead of 4. It wasn't a standalone card so it had a VGA passthrough from your 2D card when it wasn't active.
As for 2D cards, idk. Unless it was pro reference grade like Matrox I don't remember EGA and CGA cards being branded.
I forgot the first one, but I remember I upgraded it to an ATi Rage Pro so I could play Baldur's Gate, which needed 8 megabytes of video ram. Later I paired it with a Voodoo 2. I think it was the Diamond Monster one. And that one got replaced with a Matrox G200, which got replaced with Kyro II. I picked some odd cards back then.
I believe I had the Riva tnt2. After that upgrading to the original GeForce 256. Was on my Intel Celeron 300A that you could overclock to a whopping 450mhz!
I had an s3 virge card. Amazingly bad, it basically was no faster than cpu rendering, but looked a bit better. I spent so much time trying to trick games into running on it.
evga GTX 770 It never died
Replaced it with an evga GTX1080 it blew up 2 months out of warranty.
they sent me rtx 2070 despite the warranty(MISS YOU EVGA). I gave that card to my wife and upgraded to a 3080 from aorus.
the card is great, but the software that comes with the card is beyond awful. I will probably get an Asus next time.
I had an ATI all in wonder 9600. That card was very unique because it also had a built in TV tuner and AV capture card that could turn your PC into a DVR of sorts. It went into an agp slot before PCIe was a thing.
It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.
The first one I got was some integrated cirrus logics chip that didn't even have 3d acceleration. The first one I bought with my own money was a GeForce 7800GT in late 2005
My single-slot Radeon HD 6770 from PowerColor was quite nice, although outrageously loud toward the end of its lifespan. Bit of a dead end from the start though (last of TeraScale, never got Vulkan), but I still had a blast with it.
It was for my first "own" pc in 2001. I didn't have one specific game in mind when buying it, but the first thing I played with it was Giants: Citizen Kabuto.
That would be a gt 8800. It was a gift from a friend when I build my first pc.
With some tweaking, it ran great for years even though it was quite old by the time it was given to me. It had some features I kinda miss in newer gpu's
It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.
The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that's just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.
Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.
Mine was an ELSA Erazor III LT (the name somehow stuck). It was an offer that was bundled with horribly bad and clumly mechanical shutter 3D goggles. I remember trying Half Life with it. It was rattling all the time and the 3D effect was mediocre.
It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn't even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.
I'm amazed at how many people remember the hardware they purchased 30 years ago.
If you hold onto your cards for 6-7 years, that's only around 5 cards.
Mine goes:
Man that voodoo card was my birthday AND my Xmas gift one-year. I was lucky I got it
Yeah I need to check every time which one I have. And I built my PC myself so it's not that I would have no idea lol
You never forget your first.
3dfx voodoo 3 3000, with its whopping 16MB of VRAM.
It ran Unreal Tournament like a charm. Playing CTF on dialup though was not always great though..
The ultimate LAN flex.
It was a shiny EGA card.
On an 8-bit ISA bus, with a whopping 64kB of VRAM. It could display an amazing 16 colours on one screen.
My friend who had a CGA card was so jelly with his four eye-soaring neon colours.
If we're talking accelerated graphics, I bought a voodoo 2 with 8mb of RAM which linked up to my ATI Mach 64 2d-card.
I remember when the EGAs came about. Damn, it was like stepping into the future. But I didn't have a color monitor so it didn't matter. I was probably more envious than your friend.
Nvidia Riva TNT, because the onboard graphics were only going to play EverQuest (beta) and Rogue Squadron like a painful slideshow, if at all.
I got that exact one too! It was way better than the Voodoo 3DFX cards.
Voodoo 2 baybeeee
Geforce 2 fx
I attempted to upgrade such a card and were suggested the Geforce FX 5200.
I was so hyped. After finally installing the games I always wanted to play I ad to realize: This passive cooled card supported DX9 on paper but its performance was worse.
It crushed me back then and since then I have never bought a desktop PC part ever again.
But then recently I was gifted an old rig from a friend. Put a Readon RX 6700 (or so) in it. So my first actual graphics card is this radeon!! :)
Buddy, if you read this: Thank you again, much love. You are an awesome beeing.
an S3 Trio card.
Trident VGA?
I got a 3DFX voodoo as soon as they came out. GL quake was mind-blowing.
I bought a Riva TNT
Then a GeForce 2
Then a Radeon 9000
Then for a bunch of years I just moved into laptop after laptop with discrete GPUs.
Now I still have a 1080 and a 2070 doing a little bit of light AI work and video transcoding for me. But I'm still relying on crappy laptop GPUs for all my gaming. They're good enough.
I got a 3Dfx from a computer fair in Liverpool just so I could play Quake 2 CTF, it was absolutely mind blowing not even an understatement.
I was rocking Geeforce 2 and Soundblaster AWE 32. Good times😄
3060 ti I bought during the shortage, overpaid soooo much haha
Yeaaaaaahhh. 2k total for the prebuilt ended up being comparable to a shortage price at the time.
Still holding up what about yours?
Mines is still going quite strong, paired with a 5 5600x and runs well for (almost) everything I want at 1440p more-than-60-fps
Exact same setup here. Was what I was shooting for too.
Was best price to value at the time. It is almost showing its age for high graphics but has been super solid.
Nice!
Voodoo Banshee, so I could play Quake, Unreal and Deus Ex.
7950 gx2
Ahhhhh, back when GFX Box Art was better than the video game box art on the shelf adjacent
Riva TNT2
NVIDIA RIVA 128
I feel like so many of the asklemmy questions are covert methods to profile users, so I never give real answers.
What value would this information have? You might get an approximate age estimate?
Put all the various questions together and you have lots of good info to profile.
This one feels particularly guilty
A 3dfx Voodoo, it came with POD as a pack in game and it looked so good with Glide. My favourite racing game memories.
Technically, never, none. Untechnically RTX 3080Ti laptop.
My prime gaming years were self moderated by only going to internet cafés as a strict rule to manage my time. I spent a lot of time at cafés, but nowhere near as much as I would have played if I had my own hardware. It wasn't the money. It was about the time management and a large part of how I owned my first auto body shop business.
I think Radeon 9600xt?
Ooo yeah back when it came with a free code for Half-Life 2.
Pretty sure me too. It was an AGP card lol.
Cirrus Logic GD5428.
Gtx 1050ti, great card loved it
That was the second card I got and it set a high standard for me lol
Hercules Prophet 9700 Pro
I remember because it was my first PC that I got for myself. I was an intern at a small computer repair shop and that's where I learned how to build computers.
Before that I only played on my parents PC and afterwards I switched to Mac.
Same. I had the Hercules Gamesurround Muse sound card to go with it too.
Voodoo Monster 3D
Edit: wait I misread the assignment. That’s the first 3D accelerator I bought. I have no idea what my first gfx card was it was like 37 years sgo.
Nvidia Riva 128 AGP with 4 megs of ram. I will never ever forget when they released hardware accelerated opengl drivers and I played Quake GL for the first time. It was hitting 120fps and looked absolutely beautiful compared to the software rendered games I'd played up to that point.
Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64
Technically, an ATI Radeon 9800 as that was my first custom built computer in 2003. However, the ATI Rage IIc was the gpu inside my first desktop computer, an iMac G3 in 1998. But the first one I used was the VGC 12-bpp palette graphics of the Apple IIgs, where I was first introduced to computer games and upgrading the accelerator cards and memory to play new games with more demanding requirements in 1994.
Dont remember the details anymore, but I remember something called "Voodoo".
Also, connecting 2 different types of graphics cards with a cable on the outside for some reason.
I will never forget the joys of the playing Half-Life 1 on max settings with my Diamond Monster3D Voodoo2.
ViRGE 3D, upgraded the memory with 2 chips to play Tomb Raider.
GeForce 256 on my first Windows computer when I went to college. Before that, I was using motherboard graphics on a series of Macs growing up.
Quite a bump. That was a really good card at the time.
Sapphire Radeon RX 480 (4GB)
Me too! I'm actually still running mine, I've been desperately needing an upgrade
I was about to get one of those used (only difference is it being the 8GB version) but at the end it turned out it didn't work so I bought a new RX 6600 instead
A VGA card. In an IBM PS/2.
The first 3D accelerator card I ever had was a Voodoo 2 of some variety.
Voodoo Banshee
First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.
GTX750ti>GTX1070>RX6800
Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.
ATI Rage something on AGP bus, no 3D acceleration, certainly no Openssl etc, but it had hardware MPEG2 decoding, you know, for DVD
My parents later bought me GeForce 2 MX400, in 2007 i bought a new PC with my own money (first salary) with GeForce 7300GT, later upgraded it to 9600GT, then Radeon HD 7770, GTX 1050 and now RX 6600, it's a Theseus's PC at this point
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP
Upgraded my highschool family desktop I took to college with a GeForce 8800 GT , used until I build a new pc with a Radeon 7970 GHz edition, which was replaced with a rx580 after the card passed away from light coin poisoning. Desktop is now running unRAID and my new main rig has a gtx 3070 in.
Rtx 3070
A Monster 2 8 MB. I remember being angry at my parents that they didn't get me the 12 MB version. But I couldn't formulate my anger because I didn't understand the difference between system and GPU RAM.
Still, I was amazed how quickly weapon switching now was in Jedi Knight. And Unreal always looked thr best in Glide. And the included rotating donut demo with bump mapping was awesome! A feature that would go on to be touted as the revolutionary hot new shit even 20 years later.
3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. I remember thinking it was so cool that it had 2 chips on the same board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5
ATI rage was in my family computer Diamond monster fusion was what I bought myself to replace it so I could play unreal properly.
6569 R1 VIC II PAL Video Chip
GTX 980. put it in my first self built tower, which I still use to this day
EVGA 970 SSC
Man I miss EVGA. Did the upgrade to a 980 Ti when it got launched soon after.
First discreet graphics card was a GT755M really got me into gaming.
an ancient card with a colorful box from 3dfx.
I think it was a voodoo 2, but not one that came bundled with creative soundblaster.
Yes, we needed another physical card for sound.
Yup the same I had too
ATi EGA Wonder, it could do a whopping 640 x 350 with 16 colors!
GeForce2 MX
First one that someone bought for me: Riva TNT2
First one I bought myself: ATI Sapphire 9600 pro
I think it was S3 Virge. Remember playing Tomb Raider with smooth textures.
If by graphics card you mean 3D hardware acceleration, then it was a Canopus Pure 3D. It was equivalent to the first Voodoo add-in card but IIRC it had 6 MB of RAM instead of 4. It wasn't a standalone card so it had a VGA passthrough from your 2D card when it wasn't active.
As for 2D cards, idk. Unless it was pro reference grade like Matrox I don't remember EGA and CGA cards being branded.
Nvidia GeForce 8400gs
Went great with my duo core 🥲 for that buttery smooth 30fps
I think I had a Voodoo 3 at some point. Then a Voodoo 5 at the family PC.
Then on my own PCs Radeon 1900Xt -> radeon 4780 -> radeon 7770 -> radeon 480 -> rtx 2070 super.
Intel HD
A Matrox Millennium.
I forgot the first one, but I remember I upgraded it to an ATi Rage Pro so I could play Baldur's Gate, which needed 8 megabytes of video ram. Later I paired it with a Voodoo 2. I think it was the Diamond Monster one. And that one got replaced with a Matrox G200, which got replaced with Kyro II. I picked some odd cards back then.
I believe I had the Riva tnt2. After that upgrading to the original GeForce 256. Was on my Intel Celeron 300A that you could overclock to a whopping 450mhz!
I had an s3 virge card. Amazingly bad, it basically was no faster than cpu rendering, but looked a bit better. I spent so much time trying to trick games into running on it.
evga GTX 770 It never died Replaced it with an evga GTX1080 it blew up 2 months out of warranty. they sent me rtx 2070 despite the warranty(MISS YOU EVGA). I gave that card to my wife and upgraded to a 3080 from aorus.
the card is great, but the software that comes with the card is beyond awful. I will probably get an Asus next time.
I had an ATI all in wonder 9600. That card was very unique because it also had a built in TV tuner and AV capture card that could turn your PC into a DVR of sorts. It went into an agp slot before PCIe was a thing.
GTX 760 Ti --> GTX 1060 Ti --> RTX 3080/RX6750 XT
Actual PC? GTX 960 4GB from MSI.
I got some random hand me down laptop with Win7 and probably some Intel iGPU
Hell if I know. That was 30+ years ago.
GeForce GT 610.
It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.
An Nvidia GeForce 6200. It could run assassin's creed, the first one.
Riva TNT 16MB, brand name Elsa, card called Erazor.
I have no idea what i had in my earliest PCs, but the first 3d graphics card was the 3dfx Orchid Righteous 3d.
rx580. still have it on top of a shelf.
GTX 650 Ti Super used for 80 bucks. Love that card and man did it get me through tough times.
For my first gaming rig (gift)? GTX 980.
With my own money? 2080 TI
Radeon HD 6570, bit humble. Still not very powerful, I only have a GTX 950 at best, I don't PC game much these days
GTX 1060 in a laptop. I still have it.
First and last. Radeon 9600xt
The first one I got was some integrated cirrus logics chip that didn't even have 3d acceleration. The first one I bought with my own money was a GeForce 7800GT in late 2005
Nvidia GT 9400.
Radeon 7770.
My dad got us a voodoo FX banshee on our home computer back in the day. I guess the first one I personally bought would have been a GTX 970
My single-slot Radeon HD 6770 from PowerColor was quite nice, although outrageously loud toward the end of its lifespan. Bit of a dead end from the start though (last of TeraScale, never got Vulkan), but I still had a blast with it.
Nvidia GeForce 2 MX 200
Same! Bought it to play Neverwinter Nights. What was yours for?
It was for my first "own" pc in 2001. I didn't have one specific game in mind when buying it, but the first thing I played with it was Giants: Citizen Kabuto.
That would be a gt 8800. It was a gift from a friend when I build my first pc.
With some tweaking, it ran great for years even though it was quite old by the time it was given to me. It had some features I kinda miss in newer gpu's
As a teen in the 2010s, my first GPU was an Nvidia 680m in a Sager (Clevo) laptop.
That thing could power through just about anything I'd throw at it. Good times.
SiS 6326 with 8MB.
It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.
The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that's just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.
Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.
ATI Mach32 EISA. It looked to good on paper, but somehow, it did not make DOS go brrrrrr 😟
A Cirrus Logic, on VLB on my 486DX/40, with 4 MB of RAM, and a SoundBlaster card. December 1994.
Mine was an ELSA Erazor III LT (the name somehow stuck). It was an offer that was bundled with horribly bad and clumly mechanical shutter 3D goggles. I remember trying Half Life with it. It was rattling all the time and the 3D effect was mediocre.
A GeForce 9 series
First custom pc I got had a NVIDIA 6600 gt
AMD Radeon 6300M.
Or if mobile doesn't count: GTX 1060-6GB
Intel i740. Awesome bang for buck card in the late 90s!
First computer I built had a BFG 7600gt with the first upgrade I ever did was a BFG 8800gt
Miss BFG and EVGA for nvidia cards.
Oh man, talk about bringing me back in time. My first card was a voodoo 2.
It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn't even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.
3dfx Voodoo2, followed by a Riva tnt2. Good times were had.