I often see people here debate who effectively won X retro console generation, but not graphics cards. Why is that?

And before you say, “Well, it’s just a mere utility,” I’ve met people who debate the best lawnmower brands in a similar way. I’m sure there’s room to discuss old Nvidia vs. ATI GPUs just like we do with consoles.

>>11810913 (OP)
Different game consoles have a distinct identity to them, or at least they did prior to recently. Not so much for GPUs, especially after the death of 3dfx.

PC GPU generations in retro times are like dog years compared to console generations. They were pumping those shits out like they was candy.

>>11810913 (OP)
There were so many graphic cards and usually you would be just happy with it unless you bought one of them stinkers.

>>11810913 (OP)
Monkey.

>>11810913 (OP)
That shit's for nerds, /vr/ is made up of the cool kids. Nobody here cares about your "megabits" or your "interlacing" or whatever trash compshitter game mommy bought you. We're too busy playing bad ass consoles games that we bought ourselves with your stolen lunch money.

>>11810995
1024x768

Consolefags were jealous, shit looked crisp

>>11811007
When I had a brand new Radeon 9700 I thought anti-aliasing was stupid. I liked seeing the sharp edges of the polygons and knowing how many my graphics card was pushing.

>>11810913 (OP)
desktop graphics have always been a regression to the means. it's not like lawnmowers where there may be unique features on them. for graphics cards it's simply "does this run the game well?" unless you consider things like the driver settings control panels a selling point of the cards, which i do not.

>>11810995
and yet you bought the console with sixty four mega blast processors, do the math!

>>11811036
Graphics cards did have different features. Early 3d cards all had their own api Glide, SGL, NVLib, S3D, CIF. Late 90s had 16-bit vs 32-bit, texture size limits, filter methods, DVD acceleration. Early 00s AA/AF differences, pixel shader version support, pipeline configurations, tesselation support.

when you buy the nintendo or sega you made your choice and now you have to relentlessly cope and defend them. with graphics cards there were tons of options, and you could upgrade. people didnt have to become cultists like console warriors. even still there definitely was brand loyalty just not to the same extent

As somebody who never delved into old graphics cards and just made do with whatever on board shit came with with my computer - what is the best graphics card to get to play 90s to early 2000s games? Like what would give me the best results for Quake and Half-Life 2?

>>11812981
if you just want to play games then a modern one. You can use with wrappers and emulators or modern re-releases for most popular games