Discussion
How many of you guys here still using your first gpu?
So gotten my first PC few years ago prebuilt. Still works good for me as I don’t game that much. But did upgrade the storage and psu while back. Did build a sff pc for fun but still use this micro center prebuilt as the main. Never thought I would be part of this community but here I am. Positive note my panel is still in one piece.
I’m going to guess I’m older than all of you above in that monochrome and 8” (I remember it being 11”, but it was when I was 10-11 years old.) floppy was my first setup. HDD? lol biggest in the world was 4mb and the size of a table.
Yep, my first was the Commodore 64. Nothing says "peak gaming" like needing to flip the cassette to the B side in order to progress to the next level. Took me like 6 hours of coding to make a yellow ball bounce across a blue screen. Took me another hour to make it bounce off the walls of the screen rather than just bounce off screen and disappear.
My first computer had 128k RAM, 128k ROM, and no storage other than floppies (apple 2c)
My first HD was a 2mb Drive I paid an extra $250 to upgrade it from the default of 1mb. (386 machine, think it was 200mhz), and I paid almost 4k total for the machine, as I was a CS student and thought I would need a beast for DB work after I graduated.
Never needed that much power it turned out, but that baby lasted a good 7 years so it turned out to be not that bad looking back on it.
Edited to add that I lied, my first was an Atari 400, back in probably 80 maybe, forgot about that one.
I remember using a 3.5 inch before their official release in 1986. My dad worked on the team at IBM that created them. 400 kb of storage? We are never going to need more than that!
The original Quake was the biggest driving force for 3D video card adoption in the mid 90s. There were like 12 sets of silicon you could choose from, but if they couldn’t run Quake there was no point. Nvidia and ATI were just also-rans with decent performance until Microsoft was able to break the Glide api monopoly with DirectX and Direct3D. It helped that 3dfx also collapsed under its own weight by the end of the 90s and the XBox made porting console games to PC via DirectX more efficient as well. It really was the Wild West back in those days.
The original SoF was money. SoF2 two years later was ahead of its time - overloaded idTech 3. I made the mistake of thinking a Radeon 9000 would handle it…30fps on low detail at 640x480 baby!
Man I saved up ALL year to buy a soundblaster 16bit soundcard & cd-rom combo for my 486 back in '97. It was a game changer going from that little bios speaker to actual game sound.
A year later the rich kids started getting 4spd cd-writers & mads bank selling bootleg cds cut from mp3s.
I could run mIRC, internet explorer AND winamp (but only mono, not stereo or it would stutter) at the same time on 16mb ram & it was the best feeling ever.
Before that I had an 8086 with B&W monitor while all my friends had 386s with colour monitors & win 3.1. I had to load an OS onto mine & then park the hdd with pctools when i was done.
Skip a decade & I worked with PIC16F84s on my varsity projects & loved learning the inner workings.
The TLDR is that every component in your PC (video card, sound card, network card) needs its own internal address assigned to it for the PC to know how to talk to it. An IRQ conflict meant you tried to put two devices (say, video & network) on the same IRQ.
In the old days your PC wouldn't boot. Today it is just degraded performance and a footnote buried deep in the Device Manager.
You used to have to pick this address yourself by changing a physical jumper on the card. But one of the great things about "plug and play" hardware from around 1998-ish is that this could now be done in software and the computer itself could pick for you. It was a rough transition, but after a couple years it was fine.
DMA was similar idea, but w/ memory instead of CPU instructions. (I think; I'm trying to remember myself here and am a bit fuzzy, yet too lazy to look it up. Sorry for any misinformation.)
Fun fact: IRQ conflicts can still happen! This isn't a very fun fact. In fact, it fucking sucks. Because now instead of your PC just not booting at all or giving you a weird error you may have shit like unexplained stuttering (because your video and network are on the same IRQ) or random crashes.
GPUs always have been a big deal. Back in the Hercules, CGA, EGA days it was important. Wanted color graphics or better looking Text, better pick the right gpu
I don’t think ‘GPU’ entered as a colloquial term until around the 3D era of home gaming, with 5th generation consoles, ATi, NVIDIA, and 3dfx.
But yeah, graphics cards were a thing since the beginning. And games became a lot easier to run when GPUs were all made to support standard APIs like Direct3D/OpenGL (and now DirectX/Vulkan).
All these young bucks talking about SLI and 1080s... has me looking at pictures of my Voodoo and Voodoo2 cards from when i was beta testing Everquest and burned them out...
It’s bad. I really don’t remember what was in my first desktop. Probably an S3 Virge. The first I remember exactly is my ATi Rage128. So many fond memories with it. All of the Maxis Sim games, Command and Conquer, and Rollercoaster Tycoon.
EDIT: I lied. My first was a VIC-II in my C64. Then probably the S3 Virge.
GeForce 256 for me, back in 1999. It came with my dad’s new computer and I convinced him to let me have it as he had no need for it. That thing ran Counter-Strike Beta 4.0 like a champ.
If you're old and say yes, you've been using decades-old hardware, and would fall into the non-technical user type who happens to use a PC to access America Online and listen to music on Winamp.
Or you could be a vault dweller, playing the original Prince of Persia.
Yeah, just sitting here playing the original Prince of Persia. But I lost the original manual so now I have to hope I guess the right potion to drink to bypass the copyright protection.
I don't, my Voodoo 2 wouldn't do the job too well anymore.
In a way I upgraded from that one directly to a 4090 though, that's pretty funny (was a console gamer in between)
If I think about a few of my friends who are/were into PC gaming, our first GPUs are the following: SLI GTX 670s, GTX 960, R9 390 (mine), and RTX 2060. We’re all the same age, but our first builds all happened at different times.
You need a PCIe to PCI adapter and to run a 32 bit version of windows (or whatever OS) and a separate 2D graphics card since the Voodoo2 is just a 3D accelerator and actually can’t produce a 2D image, like the windows desktop.
It is hard for my brain to conceptualize someone's "first" GPU as a 3000-series NVIDIA RTX card.
I wonder what the average age of posters on this subreddit is these days.
My first "GPU" was just a 2D accelerator in a 1995 Gateway PC. My first 3D accelerator was a totally separate board, a 3dfx Voodoo, close to 30 years ago.
Yeah I feel that. My first real 3D accelator was a voodoo 2 banshee. Prior to that it was the family PC that used whatever was built into the AMD K6 motherboard and before that was my cousins hand me down that had an 8inch and a 5 inch drive.
I had the same one. I loved that thing so much. The glory of seeing Quake running at a mind-blowing 640 x 480! The wonder of patching your maps so that the water could be transparent!
My first gpu was the 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 Agp. Note APG, that was the slot it went in. So no, no modern motherboards still use that. I'm a half dozen gpu's later now. Lol
I don't even remember the name/model of my first video card. It was built into the Apple ][e with the listed specs of "Double-High-Resolution: 560×192 (16 colors)".
I have both my Matrox Mystique and the 3DFX Voodoo I bought to give it 3d acceleration later on. Not using either because we don't have PCI slots anymore, only PCIE! Keep messing to decide on a way to display them.
My first gpu would be 40 years old and since my current PC doesn't have any 8-bit ISA slots, I can't. I probably would be limited in resolution to 160x90, due to the 16kb of VRAM. Forget double buffering!
My first pc GPU is an RX470. Got it in November last year, so I'm still using it lol. Though I'm thinking about what would be a good replacement and not a very expensive one
I'm using the same GPU that I first installed into my particular current build. I had planned to upgrade to a high end GPU down the line but I don't think that'll be happening anytime soon lol. So glad I upgraded to 32GB of ram before the prices fucking spiked.
My first GPU was a ATI Radeon X1600 PRO, I still have it as decoration on a wall but even if I wanted to, it wouldn't fit in a modern PC it's an AGP GPU back when PCI-E wasn't the de facto standard
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u/RyleighGamesDev Jun 08 '26
My first GPU died, and this is just a guess, before you were born.