Started with a Riva TNT 16meg - was never really very impressed with what it did. Never felt "fast", although things looked a lot better with hardware acceleration. Does anyone else fondly the remember the transition from software rendering to hardware rendering?
Then, Geforce 256. Got this with a new computer, an Athlon 700. Both were cutting edge tech at the time, thinking back I'm amazed my mother agreed to buy the machine. And I got a 17inch CRT, which was enormous at the time. That was probably when I enjoyed gaming most actually.
My next machine, built mostly by me, came with a Radeon 9200 (non pro). Not a bad card I suppose, did what it needed to do, ran Counter Strike Source and Half Life 2 well enough, didnt cope very well with Doom 3. I later upgraded it to a 9600XT, which was a lot faster but perhaps not as big a difference as I would have liked. That PC travelled the few hundred mile trip from home to university and back again a few times, then nearly 4 years after it was built, was moved to London, where it still is today. And working... in a fashion. Its graphics card doesnt seem to work properly anymore - crashes after a few minutes even in Diablo II. But otherwise the PC is going strong, 7 years later.
Next PC, the first PC I built with my own hard earned cash, had a Geforce 8800GTS 640. Probably the best card I've ever owned. I mean, it lasted for 3 years, and still ran brand new games perfectly, including Dead Space and Race Driver GRID. Yeah it didnt score top marks in Crysis, but then nothing did, and it could at least run it in high resolution (1680x1050) on medium-high detail.
Newest card is a Club 3D 5770 overclocked edition. I'm amazed by physically small the card is compared to my 8800 GTS! But it does seem pretty fast, handled Crysis a lot better than my old card. Probably wont upgrade for the next few years.