The best video card you had that you can remember? 80's to 2010

3Dfx Voodoo3 3000 in 1999 was very cool. Up until 2010 my main PC went from the Voodoo to a Triplex Millenium Silver GeForce4 TI 4200 64MB just like lazyboy1984's a couple of posts above. Then it was onto a "Point of View" brand GeForce 8800GTS 640MB followed by a Powercolor Radeon HD 4870 PCS+ 1GB towards the end of 2008.

 

so many great cards that i really loved

Voodoo 2, GF4 Ti4200, 6600GT, 8800GT, 7800GTX. few more in the mix including my FX5700. Weirdly my card buys have really died down in later years, they just seem to last longer, although these days i buy high end parts over mid-range. only had two in the last 10 years

 

yeah agreed, i really cant believe the staying power of the 1080ti, that sucker is way out left field.

 

Yep, mine would be the 1080 simply for the longevity.

 

Canopus Pure3d. Was a voodoo 1 card. Such a massive upgrade over the s3 Virge that was in my HP PC at the time.

 

Pre 2010...clearly the best card I had was the 7800GS...the last and best AGP card lol, After that..the GTX1080ti hands down, next note worthy one would be the GTX780ti (was a great buy at the time as the Aussie dollar was extremely strong against the US dollar at the time)

Entire list of every gfx card I've had (from memory) Geforce 2 MX??? (not sure on my first one), FX5200, 7800GS, Sli 8800GTS 320mb, GTX260, HD5870 (my only AMD card and had terrible driver issues), GTX580, GTX760 4 gb (server PC), GTX780ti, GTX1080ti, RTX2070 Super (server PC current), RTX3080ti (Current)

 

To help people understand (or remember) how mind blowing this was at the time:
You went from software rendering where the Pentium of that era would run Tomb Raider at 320x200 at best looking like:



To this 30fps @640x480 with 3dfx hardware acceleration + patch.



Source

Software rendering - ~7m37s
3dfx: ~10m30s.

 

voodoo 2. like many, it changed quake for me.

creative geforce ddr. this one wasn't particularly special. but the creative brand being the bees knees to me back then, made this one a grail for me.

 

Having a Diamond TNT2 and Diamond Voodoo2's in SLI was a highlight for me back in the day.

 

I remember getting a train down the blue mountains to go to ARC computers to purchase my first 3D card, the Diamond Monster 3D (voodoo 1). Handed over about $360ish (i think) to the guy at the shop and he was surprised at the price. "Must be a good video card!" he said. Little did he know what the future held for videos cards and their respective prices

Back then i had the loopback cable too, as the card only did 3D, no 2D support at all so you needed 2 cards. Finally i could play Quake with transparent water

 

Out of interest, Digital Foundry recently put out this video:

October 11th 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256, the original Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). With cutting edge technologies like hardware-accelerated transformation and lighting (T&L), combined with what was - for the time - brutal performance, GeForce 256 was a game-changer.



My favorites are the 3dfx Voodoo 1 (hard not to mention) and Radeon 9700 Pro (the video card I had when I was going to LANs every weekend).

 

The card which first blew my mind was the Creative 3D Blaster PCI (Rendition V1000E) which I brought around 1997. I remember buying it from a now long gone computer shop which was on Rundle Mall in Adelaide for a small fortune but at the time at was still living with my parents and had very little in the way of expenses.

I remember getting home that day and installing it my "Ritron Classic" and much like Yehat being absolutely blown away at seeing games 3D accelerated and smooth looking at 640x480 compared to the non-accelerated 320x200, this time with VQuake which was the Rendition accelerated version of Quake. Having grown up with CGA/EGA/VGA on the PC and other 8bit graphics before that it was simply mindblowing and I knew from that day forward I was hooked on 3D accelerators.



Special mention has to go to the Diamond Savage4 which I purchased some years later as an intermediate upgrade while waiting for what turned out to be the never released Rendition V3300 which morphed into the never released Rendition V4400. My first card turned me into a bit of a Rendition fan boy back then and while I had upgraded to a Diamond Stealth S220 II Rendition V2100 in between, it too was getting a bit long in the tooth. The Savage4, while not a overly great card performance wise, quality wise (which is something I valued highly) it rendered games beautifully especially those which supported S3 Texture Compression which made for some jaw dropping (for the time) textures.

Last but not least, like many the GeForce 256. It was a game changer and besides a couple of times where I went ATi/AMD over the years, the majority since then including my current card has been Nvidia.

I never had the joy of owning a Canopus card but they were hands down the best of the OEM's. Back in the day I heard so many good things about the Canopus Total3D as from what I recall they had the best tweaked drivers and may have even been overclocked slightly, not to mention came with the now gimmicky 3D LCD shutter glasses! They saw the writing on the wall however and never released another Rendition card after that and jumped ship to 3DFx with the Pure3D.

The early 3D accelerator years were such an awesome time, I love hearing about and reminiscing about these cards. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it now not having to worry about what particular 3D API a game supported!

 

I'm trying to remember which store that was. I know there were several in the CBD.

 

I had one of these - 3DFX Voodoo 1 came out not long after and I wished I had waited. I still played a lot of Doom and Dark Forces at the time and the V1000E couldn't do it which annoyed me no end. Reason for poor performance taken from wikipedia...

"Outside of 3D games, V1000's (2D) performance was subpar in almost every way. On the extreme, in regular MCGA/VGA resolution or "Mode X", the V1000's performance was embarrassingly slow; older MS-DOS games (such as Doom) ran at near slideshow speeds, even on a top-of-the-line host CPU (Pentium 166 MHz). Rendition introduced "renutil", an MS-DOS utility, to address performance in MCGA graphics mode. The utility redirected MCGA (VGA-compatible) display mode setup to an equivalent VESA display mode, bypassing the Vérité's slow VGA core. The utility worked with all MCGA games, but was completely incompatible with games using "Mode X" VGA display mode, which could not be emulated using the VESA mode. Within Windows 95, the V1000 was passable, scoring neither top nor bottom in ZDnet's benchmark suite. In VESA VBE 2.0 display mode, Vérité's speed was outstanding, comparable to other top-rated cards of the era (such as the Matrox and ARK Logic PCI VGA chipsets.)"

 

Would love to know myself!

Memory is of course very hazy in parts but what I do know for sure is that it was on the left hand side when you got off the bus on King William Street. Where exactly is the hazy part but I got a feeling it was at least half way down the mall, possibily more so on the Rundle Street end than King William. It was quite a small shop.

Have no idea how long it was around for and I don't recall going back to it after that. Anytime I went to Rundle Mall, which was quite often all throughout the 90's, I used to go straight to the Myer Centre/Virgin Megastore to buy games.

Yeah the V1000's 2D performance was horrible which they largely addressed with the V2x00's but by that time 3Dfx was well established on the market and kicking arse.

In hindsight I probably too should of waited for the Voodoo 1 but I don't regret it. I'm of course biased here, but I always felt Rendition had the better technology such as a RISC core which gave it programmable felixbility, triangle setup in hardware which took the load of the CPU and implemented DMA transfers which greatly improved data transfer effciency over the PCI bus. All this on a standalone 2D/3D card not needing a passthrough and the reduction in video quality that brings.

All of these however were either hampered by the overall lack of performance of the V1000 or poor motherboard compatibility when it came to DMA support. At the end of the day you can have all the great features in the world but if the performance isn't there and you don't deliver it on time (something else which Rendition failed to do) then someone else is going to take the market from underneath you and run with it.

 

I bought my first PC from Edge Computers which I have a feeling was either off Grenfell St or Pirie St.

Used to get parts from a suburban PC store at Henley Beach that was on the corner of Military Road and Marlborough St.

Also used MY Computers on the corner of Grange Road and East Ave at Allenby Gardens. They shut down in the 2000s when the shops were redeveloped.

 

6800LE softmodded to a Quadro 2000

the bang for buck Maya and 3DS Max performance was stupid good.

I think that was the last series that could be softmodded...nvidia caught on quick

 

The 6600GT was legendary.

 

There were a few PC shops in that area of the CBD, the "Ritron Classic" I mentioned was from Rod Irving Electronics which was just on Wright Street.

Would love to find the old adverts from all these places to pinpoint where they all were. I used to drool over the IT section of The Advertiser on the weekend dreaming about what I would buy. I did try looking a few years back but discovered that unfortunately papers from that era are behind a paywall and I didn't feel like giving News Corp more money.

Probably deserves another thread, but do you recall there being a place in the CBD where you could rent PC games? This was all around the same time 97-98 but for the life of me can't remember where other than it was on the western side of the CBD. I only found out about it through my mate who struck up a friendship with some guy who ran an ISP in the area (name which escapes me as well!). As a side note, through this guy I was able to purchase a Pentium 200MMX for wholesale through his account, all I had to do was pick it up from the disty which was pretty sweet.

Not a lot to go on I know but was hoping you may of heard something about it. Can't imagine it lasted long since piracy would of been an issue!

 

God. I don't even remember what it was exactly but I had some Tseng Labs thing, I specifically remember that. I think it had a fan on it.

I also won some amazing graphics card I have no idea what it was at the Melbourne Computer Swap Meets (which I went to religiously every weekend... how much money did I waste there?), I had to go to some Warehouse in Clayton to collect it. I didn't even take off the shrinkwrap I sold it on ebay LOL.