What Is Your Personal Favorite Video Card of All Time?

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Nov 18, 2011
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Out of all the video cards you've owned and used, which is your favorite? Which one hits you in the feels?


Favorite: 980TI. I played and replayed more games then any other time in my life thanks to this card. Powerful, inexpensive, and still able to hold its own in 1080P.


Runner up: Voodoo 2. The card, the myth, the legend. The first time I played Unreal Tournament on Voodoo 2 SLi was life altering.
 
9700 Pro and 1080 Ti ,
  • Both cards extraordinary and maintained relevance for a very long time after it was released

Honorable mentions 7970 - could OC to 1310mhz out of the box (in an A/C cooled case at the time) considering 925mhz stock that was amazing - upgraded the bios to the GHZ edition without issue. It just kept getting better and better as time went on. Gave it to a friend who uses it for World Of Warships - card still plays games well today!
 
My Voodoo3 3000. It was my first GPU purchase, and it ran Starsiege Tribes beautifully. The switch from software to hardware mode in Tribes was mind blowing for a young Seymour.

Honorable mention is my Sapphire R9 Fury Nitro. It was a massive card, and I really liked the look of it (and I got it for super cheap when they were clearing out the R9 Fury on newegg). And, I had it during the midst of the last bitcoin boom, so sold it for profit (basically was able to trade it in for a 1080 as the 1080s were still at their market value).
 
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this was probably my favorite card,
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My Gigabyte 780ti Windforce. Carried me through Fallout 3 and 4, Assassins' creed Black Flag, the Crysis series, all of Mass Effect, and others
 
Interesting question.. [stock photos used for answers...]

Tseng ET4000 during the very short lived VLB days (Though ISA or later PCI models would be equally fine). It's not the card itself that hit me in the feels, it was the huge demo scene at that time, some of which abusing specifically that card required it to run period. I would have never taken up programming at all, let alone graphics, if it weren't for first watching some of the cool demos that abused this card. Still have that damned computer with me.

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Since then I suppose every card has just been a stopgap that's good enough to play modern games, and they never really last long. That includes the 3dfx cards, which while impressive, had a VERY short stay in my computers.. If I had to choose a modern one, I might be in the minority to select the 290x. That card has been in my secondary rig for SIX YEARS and still runs most games just fine at 1080P. I bought it for 1080P and it did it gloriously. Sad to say some new titles are putting a beating on it even at med/low settings and it's finally time to be retired from the glory of "will run anything at 60FPS", but it stood there for a long long time. If it weren't for the mainstream transition to high refresh and higher than 1080P res, I think more people would appreciate the sheer staying power of the 290/290x/GTX 980.



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First card I owned myself GeForce 3 (before the ti's came out!) Is great but my all time favourite card, as I had it so long and ran 3 of them in SLI.. 8800gtx!
 
The GeForce 256 DDR. It was my first GPU purchased ever & it was such a monster of a jump over the Riva 128 that came with the system my dad purchased for me. 2000 was the year that I also built my first gaming PC. So I have some very special memories with that system. Was a beast of a GPU for games like Unreal Tournament.
 
favorite has to be my first real gpu, 3Dblaster (voodoo) banshee 16mb which i still have and still works.. most fun probably my bios modded EVGA 8800GT with a custom cooler(can't remember what it is) which overclocked like a monster.
 
Radeon 9700/R300 was a monumental release for ATi that toppled nVidia and I remember rushing out to buy it. Subsequently the 9800 pro was also another awesome release that kept the 5800 ultra at bay.

My next favorite card was the 8800 ultra which had insane performance and lasted a long time.

My favorite card of all time is my current Titan X Pascal as I've never owned a video card this long which managed to stay near the top of performance charts. It's only after big Ampere is released that I'll be finally upgrading and I don't even know when exactly that will be, it could be mid 2020 or late 2020 which would mean the Titan lasted FOUR years! I was the type of enthusiast who upgraded to the next top card every cycle but with the huge letdown that was RTX, I've had to sit around waiting.
 
I had a Palit GTS 250 which was my first 'real' GPU that I spent a bit of coin on

I had a BFG GTS 250.

Bought it after my 8800GTS 640 randomly died. So it was a nice little upgrade. For the life of me, I can't remember what I did with that card.

My favorite of all time was a Geforce ti4200 64 meg.

First time I seen quake3 all settings set to high, 125fps. I was hooked on GPU's after that.
 
So many cards, so many years gone by... my favorites in order of purchase and notability in gameplay for me...

- Matrox m3D
- Voodoo 3 3000 AGP (first card I ever bought with my own money)
- Geforce 4 Ti 4200 AGP
- Geforce 6800GT AGP
- Geforce GTX 285
- Geforce 1080 SLI
- Geforce 2080Ti
 
9700 Pro and 1080 Ti

Sure as shit!

9700 Pro was the last time ATi / AMD showed real marketplace leadership -- not only were they higher performing, but their technology was also the 'reference' for DX9. Nvidia caught up a year or two later.

The 1080Ti, still my primary, isn't as significant; I'd say the 8800-series that brought higher-performance alongside DX10 would be similar in terms of a jump in capability as the 1080Ti, but in a time when miners were pulling bulk shipments out of AIB warehouses and severely straining consumer supply, the 1080Ti delivered the goods and was even relatively affordable. And like the 9700 Pro and 8800-series, we can expect that it'll remain a performance relevant benchmark for years to come.
 
The AIW 9700 pro was probably my favorite. It offered a lot for its time.

Always wanted to play with an AIW card -- the very concept itself has pretty much gone out of favor, despite the hardware video transcoding capabilities of modern GPUs. Imagine AMD and Nvidia providing for one or two HDMI inputs via expansion bracket with the GPU effortlessly converting the input to whatever desired output while applying basic shader-defined filters. All before the stream hits the bus, the CPU, main memory, and networking and / or local storage!

Original VooDoo graphics. GLquake FTW.

I'd been gaming in 3D on a 386DX I'd built years prior- but when my father brought one of these home, a whole new world opened up!
 
Hard one as I got good runs out of them all except 6970s. Bit of a turd card and drivers were lackluster.

But if I had to pick one, the launch 7970 @1.3GHz. Basically 780Ti or very close to 290x speed but about 2 years earlier.
I remember the local pc shop semi -jokingly telling me to upgrade a year or so later.
I said to what? I have (the above config), they looked a little sheepish and went quiet lol - enough said. The properly-bios flashed and OC'd 7970s were beasts.
 
No question my Radeon 9500 that could soft-mod to a 9700. Best free upgrade I ever had, not to mention that that card had years of staying power and great performance.
 
Hard one as I got good runs out of them all except 6970s. Bit of a turd card and drivers were lackluster.

Traded a nice GTX570 1.25GB for an HD6950 2GB, then added a second, as I was running 2560x1600. When TechReport broke with their investigation into just how assed-up Crossfire was at the time, I was in no way surprised.

Performance scaling was negative almost all of the time. I went with AMD because they were producing higher-end GPUs with more memory at lower costs, and the framerates were there, but man if you could have seen 80FPS feel like a slideshow!

I'm glad that we're taking frametimes as a community very seriously now, and that there aren't any real deficiencies save for the first two generations of Threadripper due to consumer software stacks not being built with NUMA in mind. Even AMD's somewhat odd Zen configuration is putting out great low maximum frametimes!
 
8800 GTX, hands down. One of the most significant architectures ever made. Was so good NVIDIA laid back and raked in money for 4 years on the Tesla architecture only providing us with node shrinks. It was also significant for me because I put two of these in my first ultra performance PC after being on low- to mid-range since the early '00s. Those cards lasted me 6 years until they died on me. Mine were BFG Tech OC2 models.
 
I would have never taken up programming at all, let alone graphics, if it weren't for first watching some of the cool demos that abused this card.
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Name checks out! :)

I still love retro-styled games which emulate that look. It's not just nostalgia, it has a look all its own which actually makes many things look better than higher-resolution attempts.
 
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8800 GTX, hands down. One of the most significant architectures ever made. Was so good NVIDIA laid back and raked in money for 4 years on the Tesla architecture only providing us with node shrinks. It was also significant for me because I put two of these in my first ultra performance PC after being on low- to mid-range since the early '00s. Those cards lasted me 6 years until they died on me. Mine were BFG Tech OC2 models.

Exactly. I used it until my third nforce 2 board bit the dust. Sold them on ebay only like 2 years ago for $100 a piece. Two were BFG and one, I do not recall.
 
Easily the 9700 pro. Was in my first true custom build along with a 2700+.

It got me into the field I'm in and now I'm in silicon valley so I think it's super sentimental.
 
Really don't have a favourite, the following were memorable:
1. Voodoo 1 (it changed the game completely)
2. 9700pro
3. 2900xt - overclocked it was very fast for its generation but consumed so much power!
4. Geforce 2 ultra

Each new generation has brought something to the table, I'm running a 1080ti at the moment but can't see myself upgrading for some time.
 
The first card that I had that changed gaming for me was a Creative Labs VooDoo 2 8MB. Out of all the cards that I've ever had, that one impacted me the most. I paired up with my first video card in my first computer that was mine (as opposed to a shared computer), which contained a Matrox Mystique 4MB.
I currently am using a Radeon VII. It's definitely up there. It's basically the first time in over a decade that I've had a top end card. The last time I think it was an HIS X800 XT PE, which I liked, but not enough to keep it.
 
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