Discussion Community Questions: What's Your All-Time Favorite GPU?

[Onus]

That's a rather tough call, but I think the first real gaming card that let me play pretty much whatever I wanted at the time (mostly Guild Wars, Unreal Tournament G.O.T.Y. and a few others) was a nVidia 7600GT. For sheer hours played, that one might be hard to beat.
I've upgraded any number of times, typically considerably beyond what I might need. If I had to identify the card at which I might have stopped, yet even today would not be "suffering," it would probably be the GTX750Ti. I got my 2K monitor almost entirely for text-based work rather than gaming, so having to drop back to 1080p for games wouldn't trouble me.

 

[knittersspouse]

this may date me a bit... The first video card I bought that made gaming (and everything else) interesting for me was when I upgraded to VGA for my huge 15" CRT monitor at home. WOW! At work, I was still using a 10 inch orange-colored monochrome screen. Both were fairly hot systems with Dual 5-1/4 inch full-height floppy drives and no HDD. I also had a full-length RAM add-in card with about 100 16-pin IC's on it to hold the program and give it real SPEED. Good Times!

 

[MayuraDeSilva]

GTX 660

 

[SSBrando]

My current Asus R9 290 4GB has been very good to me for just over 4 years now and still doing okay at new releases at 1080p. Before that was Two Visiontek HD4870's in Crossfire but man were they LOUD! My first graphics card was for playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein and American McGee's Alice. If I remember correctly they both called for at least 16MB of RAM and my Compaq Presario Desktop, Intel Pentium III @ 933MHz and 256MB SDRAM (doubled from 128MB snickers) had 11MB video memory allocated and could not be increased in the BIOS. Then I bought a Radeon 7000 32MB. I had never seen such pretty graphics.

But I'd have to say my absolute favorite was the ATi Radeon 9600XT for a few reasons. It was a fantastic upgrade to AGP 8x from PCI and had not only DVI but an S-Video output so I could play computer games ON MY TV! WHAT?! And best of all, it came with a special ATi Half Life offer. An included CD-ROM of the Valve Premier Pack which included:
Half-Life
Half-Life: Opposing Force
Counter-Strike
Team Fortress Classic
Ricochet
Deathmatch Classic
Now I don't have to save up more money to play CS 1.6 with my friends? Hot Dog!
But wait, there more! A white card in the box saying if I register this graphics card and input the CD-Key from the back of the card, ATi will send me Half-Life 2 in the mail on 5 CD's then the game hits it's release date. And ATi made good on their promise. I didn't even have to pay for the darn shipping and I still have those CD's.

 

[LORD_ORION]

Vodoo 5
The first time you get anti-aliasing at 800x600 is pretty damn special.

Also 8800GT
$200 for top of the line performance.

Vodoo also,
Just because Glide API Mechwarrior II.

 

[Wolfshadw]

the ATI All-in-Wonder was the best GPU series EVER!!! This one happens to be the 9800 Pro

nothing as good since by any stretch of the imagination.

I've got to go with Math Geek on this one I had the ATI All-In-Wonder X1800XL in my HTPC. I forget the name of the Microsoft software (Microsoft Essentials?) that allowed me to broadcast live TV over the Internet, but it made those slow days at work much more bearable.

-Wolf sends

 

[jtcmedia]

The Ti4200. Quite the card in its day.

 

[-Fran-]

ATI 9800PRO takes the cake for me. Specially the "All in Wonder" version.

Then, the 4850 has a soft spot in my heart.

Cheers!

 

[Deleted member 362816]

I would have to say the GTX 200 series more particularity the GTX 260, Before this card I had a XFX GTX 9600, The 260 was the largest performance gain that I have personal to this day experienced. I wish I still had my BFG GTX 260, Heck it even had a back-plate and that was not common in those years. When 4K was first starting I will say that the R9 Fury X was quite a good card also just took allot of power.

 

[ExoticX]

Tbh I'm relatively new to pc gaming, but my current gpu, GTX 980, has been the most powerful and best price to performance I've had

 

[Unolocogringo]

Wow kind of hard to pick one favorite.
The Voodoo Banshee was my first 3d card.
But my best overclocker and Mad Onion 3dmark record holding TI4200 was probably my most favorite.

 

[panathas]

1) Diamond Stealth 64 S3 Vision968 2MB PCI. Back in the DOS era, it was the fastest (and pretty expensive) 2D video accelerator of its time (no 3D back then) and it allowed me to play Wing Commander 3 & 4 at high res & settings (640x480 lol). Good old times.

2) Diamond Viper V330 (Nvidia RIVA 128) 4MB PCI. It was my first 3D accelerator. Originally I wanted to get a 3DFX Voodo card but it was pretty expensive back then and it also required a separate 2D graphics accelerator card and I wanted to use my previous 2D card for another PC. This was the card that allowed me to enjoy the 3D game explosion era.

 

[art.cabbie]

EVGA GTX660 Signature 2 FTW

I am an Industrial Designer and I loved the appearance of this GPU.
It is restrained and handsome.
My 660 was a great card for a long time and then I bought a second one to use in SLI.

 

[davetech20]

What a great topic - reading everyone’s answers brings back many fond memories! One of my personal favorites was moving from a Matrox Millenium and Orchid Righteous 3D dual card set up to a Diamond Stealth II. The $100-200 Stealth II was a vast improvement over my previous $700 combo because it just worked. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the two card setup was probably just overloading my standard issue 200W power supply. But, I was big into SODA Off-Road Racing at the time and that game loved the Rendition Verite chip in the Stealth II.

Dave

 

[Kewlx25]

Diamond Monster3D-2 Voodoo2 with a Stealth cooler. I'm not sure which card I put my hours on, the Voodoo2 or Voodoo3. Did a lot of CounterStrike on my V3, but plenty of Quake TeamFortress on my V2.

 

[strouda56]

For me it's a tie between the 9700 Pro or 8800 GT(S), and the GeForce MX440. The Matrox Parhelia was up there too, as it was the first card to support a multiscreen setup.

 

[LordConrad]

The VIC-II chip in my Commodore 64 is my favorite. Most of my childhood gaming was done on this machine. When the C-64 was released, it was the only home computer with hardware sprites.

 

[jossrik]

I have a couple, the radeon 580s I'm fond of, cause I built a mining rig out of them with purchases from black fri @ 199$ a piece then when I realized mining wasn''t for me, sold them a month later for 450 a piece on eBay. Yes, I was honest and told everyone they were used for mining, but they were so hard to come by people still bought them up... My favorite card that I used for a daily driver, gotta say the 1070. I bought it with using the EVGA Step-Up program (you should check it out if you haven't heard of it) within the 90 days to get the 1080ti, which I now have, but that 1070 did everything I wanted it to. Don't hear me wrong, the 1080ti is awesome at everything, but it's a premium card, it should be, the 1070 (paid 350$ about two months before the 1080tis came out) was a workhorse though.

 

[atomicWAR]

That's a really tough one...

The first graphics card I swapped out myself was a Nvidia Geforce 256. It replaced my Nvidia Riva TnT 2 that ran on a Pentuim 3 500mhz CPU with 128MB of ram. So the original Geforce/ first ever "GPU" (called graphic's accelerators prior to this) holds a pretty tender spot in my heart. Other notable mentions are the Geforce 3 (you made quake 3 arena so smooth), ATI 9700 pro (some of the best image quality I have ever seen even to this day) and the GTX 8800 (unfied shaders for the FPS win!!).

 

[cewhidx]

Upgrading from an old fx 5200 pci card to my first PCI Express 8600 gts 512 mb gave me the biggest wow moment I've ever had in PC gaming. I'd never have believed that kind of performance could exist if I hadn't seen it for myself. Since then I've been skipping generations and going for upper tier cards (GTX 470, GTX 780, and now Rtx 2080) trying to replicate that moment, but for me that old 8600 gts will always hold that defining moment when I really embraced PC gaming.

 

[emeralds1000000]

Radeon 9700 Pro here !!!

 

[tobalaz]

Easy, Radeon 9500 on the L bus.
I'd re-solder to unlock them and put a modded Intel low profile copper cooler and some copper heatsinks for the ram and Bam! Discount 9700!
$600 performance out of a $200 CPU, while I loved my 750ti due to it's amazing price/ performance and low power requirement and the performance of my current gtx 1070 I've yet to get such huge gains.
I feel the same way about my AMD Barton 2400 CPU, absolutely amazing results and overclocking with a refrigerator repair kit, exacto knife and tube of super glue.

 

[greblos]

My favourite GPU that I've owned is my 2MB ISA ATi Mach64. It had some challenging DOS game compatibility foibles, but I loved it anyways. I went on a quest to find the 2MB ISA version in the late 90s so that my ISA-only Compaq Presario 486 could run high/true colour graphics. Everybody thought I was crazy looking for an ISA graphics card even then. I wasn't allowed to fool around with my family's relatively new Pentium II system, so that Presario 633 and Mach64 card were my tinkering playground. I broke both the card and the system repeatedly, but always managed to get them going again. One of my first experiences with PCB soldering was when I broke some solder joints on the card's VGA connector.

 

[zfreak280]

AMD 5870. By itself, it was a pretty good card. In crossfire, it was unmatched. One of the first video cards to get nearly double the frame rate in crossfire, a feat which was nearly impossible before the 5000 series.

 

[Andrew Harding]

My favorite predates all this fancy 3D stuff. It was my IBM EGA card, which was my favorite because before I got it, I had Civilization but could not play it because my PC could not output CGA. Got that EGA card and then BOOM, I could spend dozens of hours of my free time playing that game.

Oh god. This, so much this. Though in my case it was VGA, I went from an office surplus 286 with a CGA to a 386DX with VGA, having saved a whole year to make the purchase. Totally worth it.