Best Videocard of All Time

[Chosonman]

My bias opinion,

The Visiontek Geforce 3 64 MB.

The very first high performance card I bought. (I still use it to this day) Paid $200.00 for it which at the time seemed rediculious.
But looking back it doesn't seem so back compared to the $500-$600 some of the high end cards are asking now a days.

For a little more than $600.00 you could buy 2 Dell Demension PC's with 15" LCD monitors.... That's just crazy.

 

[CrispyFried]

Voodoo 1/2

Until then, everything was like looking through a screen door. I doubt theres ever been a bigger generation to generation change since then, all the rest have been small changes.

Regular Quake vs GLQuake was jaw dropping

 

[carlosd]

Radeon 9700Pro, Geforce Ti4200.

 

[Cruise51]

no doubt ti4200

 

[bluemax]

Gah! Kids... all talking about modern 3D accelerators.

"9700" "TI4200" Phah!

You never experienced the awe of seeing VGA's 256 colours for the first time, compared the the hideous 16-colour EGA before it. EGA *without* palette-switching.

Or seeing true 3D for the very first time. nVidia and its video card that turned your PC into a game console (Sega Saturn?) was one of the first 3D cards out, and long before the "whatever-128" card that came before the TNT was. (memory fails me.)

3D? 3Dfx Voodoo was as historically amazing as the 3D Virge was disappointing. (Yes, the world's first and only 3D DEcelerator.)

 

[bradyapba]

Ah BLue max i do remember those days.. of the EGA monitor.. in fact my 1st monitor for my Commodore 64, was a RGB..... Red Green Blue baby.

 

[impemonk]

I'd have to say the LGC IO680. It was the first card with 64-bit and 64MB of DDV memory. Good stuff if you ask me.

 

[Boris the Spider]

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
for Ati i think the 9700pro will go down as the best, that turned it around for them

for Nvidia, probably the Ti4200, what a work horse of a card that is

 

[BillyBobJoel71]

a radeon 9700 was a huge leap when i played with it, although i never owned a radeon in my life.

 

[fstime]

5800 Ulta

 

[dfloyd]

There are only two cards that can even stand in this category.

The Voodoo 1 and the Rendition V1000.

Nothing else even came close to changing graphics the way these two cards did. Yes there have been nice improvements since, but these were the true cards that started 3d on the path it is now on and wow did they ever do it.

I have seen nice looking games since, I have seen very nice looking games since, but never have I seen the absolute jaw dropping day and night difference than I did when these cards were first released.

They truly reshaped gaming as we know it and did so in a way that will forever be remembered. They are what made gaming what it is today.

And yes some cards have made big improvements, Geforce I adding the first TnL unit, or Voodoo adding FSAA. But nothing was as big a difference as what these first cards did. Many may not of been in gaming at the time to see it, but it was the biggest thing to ever happen to video games since the inception of the pc.

Edit: I see several people posting different types of responses, is this a question of best card of all time or of the best card I have personall owned? If its best most influential card of all time then my above answer stands.

Otherwise, of course my newest current video card is going to be the best in comparison, but it still did not come close to doing what the above two did.

 

[creidhmeach]

Actually, I'm surprised no one has mentioned laptop graphics. I agree with the Voodoo 1, and the 9700 Pro, but I was totally blown away when my laptop with a Geforce2Go (16Mb), could play 3d games - that was unprecedented.

 

[Avalon]

First 3D accelerator I ever owned was a Voodoo 4 32MB PCI card. It took the place of my onboard 12MB Nvidia graphics in my HP 667mhz P3 system. Switching from software gaming to 3D accelerated gaming was amazing.

Only thing else that ever blew me away that much was my Radeon 9500. It softmodded to a 9700, and was only $150 when those cards were on the market. I never got a high end value like that ever again. Card still runs all my games at acceptable levels 2.5 years later.

 

[Dacalo]

When I got my Voodoo2. It came bundled with this tank RTS game (forgot the name!) but most importantly, it let me play FF VII!!

Ah the good ole days

 

[Dacalo]

Originally posted by: SneakyStuff
Radeon 9700 pro, I got one more than 2 years after it was released, and it still rocks!

Very true... I got mine around november of 2002 and it still rocks.

 

[EightySix Four]

R300 series, it showed ATi was and is a contender, which they never were before. It made nVidia crap itself and try and figure out exactly what it was going to do to fix the problem, driving them to cheat with driver optimisations. Look at the advancement in graphics since the radeon 9700 was released till the 9800xt's end-of-life... it's just insane... I'm not old enough to remember back in the voodoo days, so this card showed me what a true technical leap was.

 

[SketchMaster]

My Fav and first card is the Voodoo 2 SLI.

It was the card that let me play games in 3d for the first time and I got it for FREE! My sis old boyfreind was trying to get her to like him by being nice to me, but I knew what he was doing and milked him for all he was worth! He was a jerk anyways that went crazy. *EDIT*: he WAS crazy from the start.

Anyways I had that card untill I got my voodoo 3.

I had a buch of old computers sitting around, one of them being a Emachine that had the Voodoo 2 in it and needed to get rid of them to clean up my room. so draged it outside and smashed them to bits.

Damn I was young and stupid... Wish I had hung onto that card.


anyways.

#1: Voodoo 2
#2: Voodoo 3
#3: geforce 3 ti200 that could overclock to ti500 speeds easy.

 

[ironique]

It's got to be the 9700 pro! Totally blew away the competition! First time when it made any sense to use AA and aniso together.

 

[paadness]

Riva TNT-2 32 MB.

Still runs all games, TV output, what else could u ask for.

Voodoo should be crowned the ultimate card, that shear excitement was never found in other brands. Voodoo rules.

 

[imported_dd3mon]

I registered on the forums (been lurking for a while for my current LCD search) for this thread.

- Voodoo2. Using Voodoo1, GL Quake ran slightly slower than software quake on my fast machine and therefore didn't get used, despite it's beauty (hardcore gamers, you know what I'm talking about). Voodoo2 was the real beginning IMO. Greatest card yet in SLI or solo.

- GeForce 2 GTS - Last nail in 3dfx's coffin. I feel sorry for the Voodoo3,4,5 owners out there. Still viable today!

- GeForce 4 Ti4200 - I'm still running one of these. Enough said.

- Radeon 9700 - Wake up nVidia, you just tried to sell us hair driers.

- nVidia 6000 series - nVidia's apology to both loyal and fair weather fans who bought a 9700 - even an SLI configuration as a throwback to the greatest card ever.

- Next? Hopefully something faster that doesn't debut at $500+? Now that would be innovation.

-dd3mon

 

[conlan]

The original Voodoo

 

[2cpuminimum]

My best gfx card purchase was definitely the diamond stealth II S220 card with 4mb of sgram. It cost $25 with a $30 rebate and was enough to run starcraft. Major improvement over 512kb integrated graphics, and you can't beat the price. Also it later allowed me to build a system without buying a gfx card right away, a major cost savings since prices on old hardware typically drop in half every 18 months.
Of course after I upgraded from that to savage2000, I haven't had any reason to upgrade graphics since then.

 

[BillyBobJoel71]

what is a savage2000?

 

[MegaWorks]

9700 Pro

 

[Auric]

Originally posted by: SuperTyphoon
what is a savage2000?

S3 chip... first with HW TCL, if I recall... though the function did not quite pan out and ended up being no faster than in SW. Still, best card evar for MeTaL which was the fastest purtiest renderer for Unreal during its heyday.

As for the topic... 9700 ... or better yet the 9500 256-bit with 8 good pixel pipelines!