Best Videocard of All Time

[MDE]

Radeon 9700 Pro

 

[imverygifted]

ti4200- cheapness (under 200) and it was only about 8% difference than the ti4600

 

[CHfan4ever]

Voodoo 2 3dfx
geforce 2 gts
geforce 4 ti 4600
geforce 6800 gt


The 9700-9800 pro didnt really impress me, because they were a little push over the ti 4600( and i sold my ti 4600 in rush to get the 9700 pro...what a mistake )


I also got the same impression with my 6800gt a bit( compare to the 9800 pro) but i enjoy it still.

IMO the best card for a long time was the geforce 2 gts...damn this card serve me for a long time.

 

[ironique]

1. The 9700 Pro - Totally blew the competition away at the time of release. I remember being amazed at the frames it churned out with AA enabled. Was truly the first game where enabling AA made any sense.

2. Geforce 2 Ultra. Was an overpriced beast in its time. It was simply...... unfair.... that's the best word I can think of!

 

[rbV5]

AIW9700pro...still :heart:, awesome performance, great multimedia feature set and native YPbPr output.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Probably the original Voodoo (and Voodoo2), for bringing 3D accelerators to the "masses", so to speak (shifting the trend away from software rendering); and the 9700 Pro, for coming out of nowhere and being untouchable by anything else, at the time and for many months afterwards. (Not to mention it's still a very viable card today, 2.5 years after its release, assuming you don't try to run crazy high resolutions with AA and such - what other card had a run like that?)

 

[murban135]

ATI 9700 Pro

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
Probably the original Voodoo (and Voodoo2), for bringing 3D accelerators to the "masses", so to speak (shifting the trend away from software rendering); and the 9700 Pro, for coming out of nowhere and being untouchable by anything else, at the time and for many months afterwards. (Not to mention it's still a very viable card today, 2.5 years after its release, assuming you don't try to run crazy high resolutions with AA and such - what other card had a run like that?)

Voodoo2 SLI was usable for a couple of years.

 

[KMKTEXAN]

I'd have to go with the Voodoo 1, also. The first time I saw Tomb Raider and Quake 1 with the 3Dfx patches... WOW!! Changed everything.

 

[HighCalibreHooch]

I have to agree with WobbleWobble the Kyro series chips were the most innovative the industry has produced to date. Tile-based rendering (aka hidden surface removal) is an excellent idea that should be looked at again.

These cards had excellent image quality and very good performance. I skipped the entire Geforce 2 generation using a Hercules 4500 64MB.

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: ArnoldLayne
IBM VGA, particularly 640x480 16 color mode (square pixels!).

Square as opposed to the six-pointed star shaped pixels we have now??

If you want to go that far back, I had an "80 column card" in my Apple ][ that doubled resolution capability over previous generation with no perceptable impact on speed. That was probably the most significant gain I experienced aside from the transition to 3D.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: Rollo

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
Probably the original Voodoo (and Voodoo2), for bringing 3D accelerators to the "masses", so to speak (shifting the trend away from software rendering); and the 9700 Pro, for coming out of nowhere and being untouchable by anything else, at the time and for many months afterwards. (Not to mention it's still a very viable card today, 2.5 years after its release, assuming you don't try to run crazy high resolutions with AA and such - what other card had a run like that?)

Voodoo2 SLI was usable for a couple of years.

Yeah, I think you're right now that I think about it. Of course, I was around 14 years old when the whole SLI thing was big back in the day, so I didn't bother to research it all too thoroughly - as I didn't have the money for any of it anyway.

 

[BFG10K]

Voodoo3, 9700 Pro.

 

[SonicIce]

never did see those high res textures in UT99 on an S3 card

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: SonicIce
never did see those high res textures in UT99 on an S3 card

They're awesome, I've been using them for a few years now. (I think first on a Radeon 8500, then a 9700 Pro, then my current 6800GT) They're actually quite a bit better/higher-res/clearer than most of the textures in even the "new" games.

I never had an S3 card myself except for the "decelerator" Virge back in the day - but at least I could play Tomb Raider 2 on it in Direct3D. I tried so hard to get a wrapper that would allow me to play GLQuake2 in D3D, but alas, it was not to be (at least, not on that card)

 

[BFG10K]

never did see those high res textures in UT99 on an S3 card

You can easily see them now on any OpenGL compliant card.

 

[impemonk]

The Zanziban HX 2400 by Hercules... Hercules used to make such great video cards... now all they do is make sound cards and other multimedia devices.

 

[novice]

Wow, the memories. The voodoo 2 bringing 3d games to life, the voodoo banshee (it had 16 MB of ram!) But I think the Geforce 2 MX was what really dealt the death blow to 3dFX, followed up by the cheap Geforce 2 GTS cards. Honorable mention has to go to the Geforce 4 Ti4200 for its' long life. Still running 3 of them in various systems around the house. (My wife's sytem is stll making do with a Geforce 2 Pro 64mb Gainward card) My son got a Radeon 9800 Pro a year or so ago, and frankly I don't see that big of a gain over the old Ti4200. I guess if we build an Athlon 64 system, we may need to get a 6600 GT card. We are kind of behind the times, but it is tough to keep up with latest hardware when you run 5 different systems.....

 

[VIAN]

For me, it's gotta be the Geforce2 MX 64MB. Oh yeah. Have only been in the PC thing since November 2000, but when I went from a TNT2 M64 to the GF2, I was in heaven. After that, my upgrades never really felt that great. Just disappointment after disappointment.

But, in all seriousness, how can you doubt the power of the Voodoo Chipset.

 

[shoRunner]

9700p still using one and see no need to upgrade

 

[fstime]

9700p

 

[sodcha0s]

VooDoo 1 without a doubt. Gaming as we know it today did not exist before that card came out. After playing software only games for so long, then slapping this card in.... it was nothing short of amazing.

 

[ScrewFace]

I'd have to say my favourite card was the 3Dfx Voodoo5-5500. It had the best IQ of all preceding Voodoo cards and it had a feature called RGAA that worked right away and in every game and still looks better than my Radeon X800XT PE's TAA. At the time nVidia had the GeForce2 that had Hardware T'nL but no games were written to use it yet.

 

[sbuckler]

Any original VGA card - before this and original soundblaster for sound you wouldn't want to game on a PC.
Voodoo 1 - before then there was only software rendering.
Geforce 256 - loads of new features and performance that blew everything else out the water.
Geforce 3 - as above.
9700 pro - as above.
6800 ultra - as above (requires sli to win the performance war though).

Special mention to the geforce 4 because although there was nothing particularly special about it, it's lasted very well.

 

[bluemax]

Originally posted by: sbuckler
Any original VGA card - before this and original soundblaster for sound you wouldn't want to game on a PC.
Voodoo 1 - before then there was only software rendering.

I'm with you. The difference from 16-colour games to 256-colour with much larger palette was a WORLD of difference!
And if you thought SoundBlaster sounded good, you should have had a Roland MT-32!


And the Voodoo1, which revolutionized the whole gaming industry overnight!
And the king of Voodoo1 was the Canopus Pure3D with its bonus 2MB of texture RAM. (6MB total vs. 4MB of everyone else!)