The first I bought for myself was a PNY XLR8 GeForce GTS 250 in 2010. It tided me over for 4 years, until my power supply gave a loud POP, and I replaced pretty much the whole build just in case the other parts were damaged (or caused the damage).
A Matrox Millennium.
It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn't even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.
I don't know what hardware my first computer had because I didn't even know what a GPU was at the time... But the first GPU I ever bought was the 8600 GT.
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.
Riva TNT 16MB, brand name Elsa, card called Erazor.
First custom pc I got had a NVIDIA 6600 gt
Riva TNT2
I think I had a Voodoo 3 at some point. Then a Voodoo 5 at the family PC.
Then on my own PCs Radeon 1900Xt -> radeon 4780 -> radeon 7770 -> radeon 480 -> rtx 2070 super.
Intel HD
Nvidia GeForce 8400gs
Went great with my duo core 🥲 for that buttery smooth 30fps
MSI 4GB version of GTX970. Upgraded a few years ago to an RX6800 and I'm stoked about both GPUs tbh
ATI Mach32 EISA. It looked to good on paper, but somehow, it did not make DOS go brrrrrr 😟
Trident VGA?
I got a 3DFX voodoo as soon as they came out. GL quake was mind-blowing.
I bought a Riva TNT
Then a GeForce 2
Then a Radeon 9000
Then for a bunch of years I just moved into laptop after laptop with discrete GPUs.
Now I still have a 1080 and a 2070 doing a little bit of light AI work and video transcoding for me. But I'm still relying on crappy laptop GPUs for all my gaming. They're good enough.
3dfx voodoo 3 3000, with its whopping 16MB of VRAM.
It ran Unreal Tournament like a charm. Playing CTF on dialup though was not always great though..
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.
A VGA card. In an IBM PS/2.
The first 3D accelerator card I ever had was a Voodoo 2 of some variety.
GeForce2 MX
First and last. Radeon 9600xt
For my first gaming rig (gift)? GTX 980.
With my own money? 2080 TI
Radeon HD 6570, bit humble. Still not very powerful, I only have a GTX 950 at best, I don't PC game much these days
I think it was S3 Virge. Remember playing Tomb Raider with smooth textures.
It was a shiny EGA card.
On an 8-bit ISA bus, with a whopping 64kB of VRAM. It could display an amazing 16 colours on one screen.
My friend who had a CGA card was so jelly with his four eye-soaring neon colours.
If we're talking accelerated graphics, I bought a voodoo 2 with 8mb of RAM which linked up to my ATI Mach 64 2d-card.
Intel Graphics Media
a c c e l e r a t o r
I got a graphics card that somehow bricked hard drives. We went through a lot of hard drives before finding out this was the case. I don't remember specifics
First one that someone bought for me: Riva TNT2
First one I bought myself: ATI Sapphire 9600 pro
GTX 650 Ti Super used for 80 bucks. Love that card and man did it get me through tough times.
Voodoo 2 baybeeee
GeForce GT 610.
It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.
Voodoo Banshee, so I could play Quake, Unreal and Deus Ex.
an S3 Trio card.
Hell if I know. That was 30+ years ago.
NVIDIA RIVA 128
Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64
I will never forget the joys of the playing Half-Life 1 on max settings with my Diamond Monster3D Voodoo2.
ATi EGA Wonder, it could do a whopping 640 x 350 with 16 colors!
Voodoo Monster 3D
A 3dfx Voodoo, it came with POD as a pack in game and it looked so good with Glide. My favourite racing game memories.
innovision 3dfx
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.
Some 3dfx card, can't remember name. Was only for 3D (games), Matrox(?) card was for desktop.
Dont remember the details anymore, but I remember something called "Voodoo".
Also, connecting 2 different types of graphics cards with a cable on the outside for some reason.GTX 760 Ti --> GTX 1060 Ti --> RTX 3080/RX6750 XT
EVGA 970 SSC
Man I miss EVGA. Did the upgrade to a 980 Ti when it got launched soon after.
First discreet graphics card was a GT755M really got me into gaming.
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.
Actual PC? GTX 960 4GB from MSI.
I got some random hand me down laptop with Win7 and probably some Intel iGPUGTX 980. put it in my first self built tower, which I still use to this day
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.
6569 R1 VIC II PAL Video Chip
3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. I remember thinking it was so cool that it had 2 chips on the same board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5
First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.
Voodoo Banshee
750Ti.
It had already been out for a while (2013) when I got it (2015), but it lasted and worked very well, until I upgraded to the 5700xt (late 2019), which I'm still using and still works (mostly) great.
A GeForce 9 series
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
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP
My brother and I after putting our allowances together as kids got either a Voodoo 2 or 3 (can't remember anymore) in order to run quake 2 better back in 1999.
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.
ViRGE 3D, upgraded the memory with 2 chips to play Tomb Raider.
ATI rage was in my family computer Diamond monster fusion was what I bought myself to replace it so I could play unreal properly.
Mine was an ELSA Erazor III LT (the name somehow stuck). It was an offer that was bundled with horribly bad and clumly mechanical shutter 3D goggles. I remember trying Half Life with it. It was rattling all the time and the 3D effect was mediocre.
Cirrus Logic GD5426.
A Cirrus Logic, on VLB on my 486DX/40, with 4 MB of RAM, and a SoundBlaster card. December 1994.
As a teen in the 2010s, my first GPU was an Nvidia 680m in a Sager (Clevo) laptop.
That thing could power through just about anything I'd throw at it. Good times.
GeForce 3 Ti 200.
Combined with a athlon xp 1800+ and blistering 512 MB DDR Ram I was simply TEARING through Warcraft 3 and Half Life. Thanks mom.
SiS 6326 with 8MB.
It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.
The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that's just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.
Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.
Some Nvidia card back in the 90's
Intel i740. Awesome bang for buck card in the late 90s!
B*tchin' Fast 3D 2000
Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.
I purchased a ATI Radeon X700pro to install in the family computer so I could finally play Morrowind.
First computer I built had a BFG 7600gt with the first upgrade I ever did was a BFG 8800gt
Miss BFG and EVGA for nvidia cards.
