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  • Technically, never, none. Untechnically RTX 3080Ti laptop.

    My prime gaming years were self moderated by only going to internet cafés as a strict rule to manage my time. I spent a lot of time at cafés, but nowhere near as much as I would have played if I had my own hardware. It wasn't the money. It was about the time management and a large part of how I owned my first auto body shop business.

  • Technically, an ATI Radeon 9800 as that was my first custom built computer in 2003. However, the ATI Rage IIc was the gpu inside my first desktop computer, an iMac G3 in 1998. But the first one I used was the VGC 12-bpp palette graphics of the Apple IIgs, where I was first introduced to computer games and upgrading the accelerator cards and memory to play new games with more demanding requirements in 1994.

  • My single-slot Radeon HD 6770 from PowerColor was quite nice, although outrageously loud toward the end of its lifespan. Bit of a dead end from the start though (last of TeraScale, never got Vulkan), but I still had a blast with it.

  • A Monster 2 8 MB. I remember being angry at my parents that they didn't get me the 12 MB version. But I couldn't formulate my anger because I didn't understand the difference between system and GPU RAM.

    Still, I was amazed how quickly weapon switching now was in Jedi Knight. And Unreal always looked thr best in Glide. And the included rotating donut demo with bump mapping was awesome! A feature that would go on to be touted as the revolutionary hot new shit even 20 years later.

  • ATI Rage something on AGP bus, no 3D acceleration, certainly no Openssl etc, but it had hardware MPEG2 decoding, you know, for DVD

    My parents later bought me GeForce 2 MX400, in 2007 i bought a new PC with my own money (first salary) with GeForce 7300GT, later upgraded it to 9600GT, then Radeon HD 7770, GTX 1050 and now RX 6600, it's a Theseus's PC at this point

  • Nvidia Riva 128 AGP with 4 megs of ram. I will never ever forget when they released hardware accelerated opengl drivers and I played Quake GL for the first time. It was hitting 120fps and looked absolutely beautiful compared to the software rendered games I'd played up to that point.

  • GeForce 256 on my first Windows computer when I went to college. Before that, I was using motherboard graphics on a series of Macs growing up.

  • If by graphics card you mean 3D hardware acceleration, then it was a Canopus Pure 3D. It was equivalent to the first Voodoo add-in card but IIRC it had 6 MB of RAM instead of 4. It wasn't a standalone card so it had a VGA passthrough from your 2D card when it wasn't active.

    As for 2D cards, idk. Unless it was pro reference grade like Matrox I don't remember EGA and CGA cards being branded.

  • I forgot the first one, but I remember I upgraded it to an ATi Rage Pro so I could play Baldur's Gate, which needed 8 megabytes of video ram. Later I paired it with a Voodoo 2. I think it was the Diamond Monster one. And that one got replaced with a Matrox G200, which got replaced with Kyro II. I picked some odd cards back then.

  • Nvidia GeForce 8400gs

    Went great with my duo core 🥲 for that buttery smooth 30fps

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