Your first dedicated GPU?

[bononos]

S3 Virge decelerator briefly and then the Trident 3Dimage.

Edit-
I think the first game which made me upgrade to a proper 3d card was Thief dark project. Anyhow I got a TNT2 for it.

 

[SPBHM]

first PC at home with 3d acceleration was a Compaq with an Intel 810 IGP, it even came with "Incoming" as part of the package and I remember being impressed, even if the game was 2 years old by then, at the time the best graphics I've seen before were from the N64, so it looked good, nice resolution and smooth framerate, before that I was playing games with a Trident 1MB and software rendering for years...

my own first proper GPU was the MX400.

 

[ZippZ]

Matrox Millenium was a great 2d accelerator. I was disappointed that it was lacking in a lot of 3d features. It just had Garaud shading and z buffering which didn't do anything for gaming.

Then I got the Rendition Verite, I think it was the Diamond brand. It was cool having the first card that was able to play 3d Quake.

 

[moonbogg]

I believe it was the Voodoo 3.

 

[Raduque]

First experience was a 386 with VGA graphics. First 3D card was a Voodoo 1 which we later upgraded to a pair of Voodoo 2 in SLI. To this day that is still the only SLI setup I have ever had.

Same here. My first GPU was a Voodoo 2 SLI, and I never had SLI since. Well, unless you count a Voodoo 5 5500.

 

[Rubycon]

Dedicated GPU would be the GeForce 256 SDR version (CL Annihilator). It was rushed in late '99, the real DDR version (Annihilator Pro) came out a few months later.

Discrete video as they called them, well back in the days of the PC you had 8 and 16 bit ISA slots. Motherboards typically had NOTHING onboard except the keyboard controller. Add in cards for floppy, HDD (SCSI/ESDI/IDE), Adlib/SoundBlaster, i/o for dual serial, single parallel and of course a VGA card. I think mine was a Trident display card capable of 1024x768 with 256 colors. VESA local bus (VLB) brought in much faster graphics and true color: The Stealth 32 (TSENG 4000) VLB. Then the Diamond Speedstar 64, Stealth64 and Stealth64 video that had hardware MPEG capability. That was in '94/'95. PCI was quickly replacing VLB on early socket 5 systems.

I loved the 3dFX add on boards (STB/Monster/etc) but HATED how the included passthrough cables killed the crispness of text. I ran a Hitachi 21" CRT at 1600x1200 85Hz refresh on a Matrox Millennium II with 8MB WRAM. It looked great without that cable. Speaking of Matrox they had a M3D add on card that shipped with a racing game called Ultim@te Race Pro. That ran and played great on my Dual Pentium Pro 200! The card didn't work very well and was missing features that were painfully evident when running Remedy's Final Reality benchmark.

I tried several other products. The Voodoo2 with 12MB was nice and with a decent passthrough cable the signal degradation wasn't so bad. Even had a Quantum 24MB SLI board that was expensive and fast for the time.

The Matrox G200 was nice for 2D, pin sharp text but 3D lacking. TNT 16MB AGP cards were screamers but had poor 2D signal quality. The Analog 2D issue persisted through GeForce2 days as well. Some modified their boards by bypassing components with jumper wires for a cleaner signal. The Prophet 3D Geforce 2 64MB had DVI but no monitors supported it or its 400MHz RAMDAC without adapters. I did manage to get some converters to 13W3 analog on my workstation displays supporting 85Hz 2048x1536 and it looked great but 2D fill speed seemed lacking...

Things are so much easier now.

 

[biostud]

The first videocard I bought was a diamond stealth 64 2mb.

 

[Aristotelian]

I went from a Riva TNT (my first) to a TNT 2 Ultra to a Geforce SDR to a Geforce DDR within about 2 years. A friend's dad owned a computer hardware store and he let us 'step up' for the wholesale price.

I can still remember how excited I was...man I'm old.

 

[XiandreX]

Brings back memories

 

[fralexandr]

I think it was a rage ii or rage pro 4mb
http://www.gpureview.com/3d-rage-ii-card-255.html
http://www.gpureview.com/ati-3d-rage-pro-chip-87.html
Not quite fast enough for smooth video playback at 480p :d

 

[ericlp]

First GPU 6800 that I played any game that was really JAW Dropping and changed my game play.... Far Cry was a huge game changer for me!

2004 was a good year for hardware and games. Of course I've had video cards before that, but nothing tops out 2004 for me.

 

[Charlie22911]

If we are using GPU loosely I do believe it was a PCI S3 job in my P54 based compaq as a kid.

But the first GPU I valued was my ATI 9600, that thing treated me well.

 

[2is]

3DFX Voodoo 2 with an ATI All-In-Wonder handling the 2D stuff in a Compaq Presario

My first 2d/3d card was a GeForce 2 MX400 that I installed into my very first build

My next one was a GeForce 4 Ti4400

I'd have to say out of all the cards I've owned, the Voodoo2 and the Ti4400 were my favorites. The Voodoo because it was my first intro into the realm of 3D gaming and it was unbelievable at the time.

The Ti4400 because it was the first card I got where I really knew what I was doing and it was a huge improvement over the MX400.

It's kind of sad if you search google images for some of these older cards. You'll run across so many companies that aren't around anymore. Even though I can afford higher end parts now, I still had a lot more fun with new builds back then.

 

[mikeymikec]

Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme - note not one but two X's. 1997 or 1998 I think.

Permedia 2 chipset, 4MB video RAM. Woot.

 

[rancherlee]

TNT 2 Ultra for me, on a AMD 450mhz K6-2, buttery smooth 640x480 Q3A! Ran that for a few years then upgraded to a Radeon 64mb on an Athlon 700

 

[crisium]

The first that I bought (not a hand me down) was an Elsa Gladiac GeForce 2 GTS 32mb.

 

[dogen1]

Geforce 4 MX440. IIRC, it was a decent budget card at the time. Played a lot of Jedi Outcast on it.

Diamond Stealth II S220. Remember buying it on Boxing Day 1997 and then playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight on it.

Still one of the best shooters ever.

 

[zinfamous]

A Matrox something. I have no idea the model. A guru friend of mine was helping me put together my very first build, and I showed up without, much less ever thinking about, a GPU of some sort. He fished around under his bed and yanked out some Matrox something from some old machine and plopped it in, haha.

....I think with the next PC, it was either an ATI x600? or the GTX 4200? or something like that. the nVidia was a turd that crapped out within a year because of a shitty fan and heatsink

edit:

Geforce 4 MX440

that's the Geforce/whatever that I had at the time. At least, something in that generation. I had read later that this generation of nVidia cards were notorious for high failure rates or something like that.

 

[HannooFX]

Intel i740 8MB AGP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740

Then Riva TNT2 M64 a year later.

 

[Ajay]

Well, I think the definition of a GPU came about because of programmable shaders. For the purpose of this thread, I'll go back to my G400+Voodoo2 as my first real 3D setup. I was blown away went I added the Voodoo2 to my Matrox card, the shift for software to hardware based rending was incredible in Starsiege Tribes and Unreal Tournament. Had a couple of cards before that from ATI and Matrox (I cared more about 2D crispness at the time).

 

[imported_bman]

I went with the first 3D card I bought and that worked. My family's computer had a S3 based 3D card that never worked and I would always end up using software rendering with that piece of junk. The term 'GPU' was first used by Nvidia with the Geforce 256 in 1999, which was the next 3D card I purchased after my Stealth II.

From Tom's Hardware review of the Geforce 256:

The Features
The most important thing about GeForce is that NVIDIA doesn't want it to be called '3D-chip' anymore. GeForce is called a 'GPU' for 'Graphics Processing Unit', and this name was chosen to give it the right honors in comparison with the all-important 'CPU'. Most of us don't realize that the complexity of today's graphics chips is at least on par with any high-end PC-processor, while the price point of 3D-chips is rather mediocre compared to a CPU. GeForce ensembles no less than 23 million transistors, which is in the same range as AMD's Athlon or Intel's upcoming Coppermine processor. Intel or AMD take more than 10 times more money for one, which makes you wonder why the 3D-chip industry is still alive. The 23 million transistors in GeForce are well spent, since it's the first 3D-chip that includes a transform and lighting ('TNL') engine. This engine is the real reason for the name 'GPU', because it adds a huge amount of computing power to GeForce, which makes it a lot more than just a chip that displays 3D-graphics.

Still one of the best shooters ever.

Its expansion, Mysteries of the Sith, is also excellent.

 

[EXCellR8]

GeForce 6200 256MB looks pretty great compared to some of these things, damn.

i'm definitely from a different generation of builders, but I still think the advancement in graphics adapters from '03-04' to right now is absolutely nuts. the first GPU that really blew me away was the half gig HD4870 and that's a relic now.

 

[dogen1]

Its expansion, Mysteries of the Sith, is also excellent.

Crazy thing is, Jedi Knight was the first PC game I owned, and I still love it to this day. But I've never played more than 30 minutes of MoTS.

 

[Boris Morozov]

Pretty sure it was an fx 5600 ultra lol. It ran everything I played so I didn't complain

 

[KyleGates]