What was your experience with your first graphics card purchase?

My first graphics card I've ever owned was a Geforce 8600GT 256MB. I was looking to jump into the world of playing PC games over 20FPS on integrated intel chipsets, but unfortunately this graphics card wasn't much better. I spent more times fiddling with graphics settings than actually playing the games.

I got a 9800GT after that, which was better, but still not perfect, and it wasn't until I bought myself a GTX 970 that I was able to experience what 60FPS 1080p PC gaming was like, and it was glorious. Now I know how to avoid garbage graphics cards, so I hope I'll never have to deal with them again.

What about you guys? What were your first GPU purchases, and how did they pan out?

Voodoo ftw

/oldman

Honestly I don't really remember.... It definitely used AGP expansion slot, not PCI. It was probably around 2001-2002 when I built what was my first real computer. Probably a Radeon card... Yeah who knows... seems like a lifetime ago. I remember playing things like TFC and Morrowind on that rig. I think it had an Athalon XP CPU in it.

In 2007 I built what would be my first baller rig with a GeForce 8800. Phenomenal card at the time. It would last me until ~2013. At one point I got another one from a friend who upgraded and I put them in SLI. I'm not sure whether it made things better or worse - it was both.

Payed a ton for a Raedon 9600 Pro, thought i could handle any game no problem, but was still experiencing framedips here and there while cheaper nvidia cards run everything better. I never went back to ATI / AMD since then.

Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. 16 MB BEAST!

First one was defective. Worked just fine in 3d, but had vertical red line artifacts in 2d mode lol.

Nvidia GTX 980 was the first graphics card I ever bought. Was amazing to run The Witcher 3 at High at 60FPS. Sadly the 980 was quickly overtaken by the 10' series cards.

pc newbie at the time in 2008, so i bought an athlon 64 x2 and an 8500 gt and tried to play crysis on maximum settings ha ha hah ha ha rotfl.

My first video card was a 2d card made by Matrox. And first 3d was a voodoo card, which sucked because the early forms of those cards required a 2d card to be run with it, and it caused constant problems. But when you could get it working it was mind blowing, i remember running need for speed 2 with it, and the graphics in 3d mode were so amazing compared to running it in 2d. Lots of incompatible 3d games though.

My first 2d/3d combined card was the Creative 3dfx banshee card (basically voodoo chipset i think), think i got it around 1998, a great card considering it was one of the first cards to do this.... except it overheated and locked up a lot so i got a cheap little fan for its heatsink and it fixed the lock ups.

I think nvidia is the company that actually bought out voodoo so in some way they live on.

Mine was a crappy pixelview Geforce 6600 gt which died on me within 4 months. As it was a limited edition gpu i couldn't get replacement for it because it was no longer in stock so i had to upgrade to 7600 gt instead.

I remember buying a Radeon 9600XT Extreme on my first rig I owned back in high school... was a pretty good card for back then.

My first was a Riva TNT. I was very happy when I got it as I only had access to my friend's Voodoo 2 prior. 3D acceleration revolutionized games and it was exciting to be a part of the transition.

When I bought my 8600 GT back in 2007, I was able to get 130+ fps with Doom 3 at 1024x768 compared to barely 30 fps at 640x480 using the built-in ATI X1200 graphics (on par with Intel graphics at the time) of my laptop.

But, that was not my first PC graphics. My first PC graphics was the 16-color Tandy graphics of my Tandy 1000SX. All I can say is it was much better than 4-color CGA.

16 colors still didn't cut it. So, I switched to the Commodore Amiga which had 32 real colors and 4096 in HAM mode. Much better sound too.

My first real PC video card was some Trident SVGA card. I didn't give a crap so long as I got my 65k or 16M colors.

I believe the first GPU I ever bought and used was a Radeon x1600 Pro back in 2006 in order to play Oblivion.

I think right before that I bought some terrible Nvidia card that wasn't compatible with my machine (a Geforce 6200 I believe) so I returned it.

I had MX 460 in my first PC. It actually served me pretty well over a few years, before the fan started dying.

XFX GTX 6600. That was one cool looking box.

the first graphics card i had was a voodoo 3. usually games wouldnt use it until the user would specifically tell them to use it. so booting up quake 2...jaggie fest. engage the 3DFX card....smoooooooth (also the 3DFX logo would appear briefly like a console boot up sequence before returning to the game which was cool).

yeah that certainly left an impression.

First gpu I bought was a Voodoo 2 12mb it was a massive upgrade over the onboard 2mb video. Back in 1999 I do believe.

12MB of pure power. I had four of them in quad SLI all liquid cooled.

My first was an ATI Radeon 9550 128MB card back around 2004/2005ish. I think around 2005 because I remember wanting to play GTA San Andreas which the onboard simply couldn't do. Don't think the performance was great but it was better than the onboard. It was my first PC.

It was around 1998 I think. I remember looking at the cards, the Voodoo's were still up there in price so I opted for the Diamond brand which I think was a Riva TNT but not really for sure. It ran like crap, worse than the SIS onboard chip my computer had. I took it back and got a Voodoo 3. It was butter smooth until Kingpin came along and it chugged on high settings.

Yep.

Had all of those too, myself. (We ARE old...)

The first 3D PC game that hit me was Unreal. First level. Everybody who was there at the time remembers it. Looked amazing, back then (Glide API!!).

A second game which did a job on me back then - graphically - was Quake 2. Switching from software rendering (which we all knew too well back then) to OpenGL and BOOM! Starring at that 1024x768 CRT 50Hz VGA monitor every day for weeks. Radiation should have made me blind by now?

The first graphics card I bought was an Orchid Righeous 3D, so that I could play the original Unreal in all its graphical glory. Wondrous!

i can't remember the card, but it let me play Morrowind on Max settings after playing on the lowest. the difference was night and day - was soo happy

Voodoo as well, was pretty blown away

My first graphics card was an HD7870. The card worked great and performed well until it developed a problem where the screen turns green occasionally (apparently it was a common issue with the sapphire HD 7870 2GB Ghz edition and was apparently fixed with later models) and gaming performance suffered greatly as a result, I then traded that card in for a GTX 660 Ti and had a smooth sailing until I upgraded to a GTX 970 (which I later swapped with a GTX 1060)

My first card was a a 9800 gt which I used to play WoW. Then I got a 5870 which was unstable and kept crashing.

i had a 8800gt and it was alright

It run crysis at a glorious 20fps.I actually managed to get through most of the game game at 15-20fps.Then i got to the last level and it would crash every time so i never finished it.

I got an HD 4890 later which run it at 30-35fps

My first gpu was a PowerColor HD 4870...I think I was playing Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six and later Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Life was good.

I think it was Voodoo 2. I was amazed by the graphics. XD

A radeon something or other, 128mb memory. Fast as shit. I bought it, it arrived, and I put it in. Then I gamed.

Voodoo 3 pci...dat unreal tournament tho

ATI Radeon 7200. I remember putting that thing in my crappy Gateway playing some Unreal Tournament.