Thread 11976798

What were the most popular GPUs back in the day, whether high-end or midrange? Was there a kind of “console war” vibe over which graphics card brand was better, like we see with game companies or consoles?

this trash

GPU box art sucked balls in the 00s. All that Korea-tier 3D garbage.

>>11976798 (OP)
I mean you would have to be a hell of a lot more specific than that. The "most popular" is whatever was in the best selling pre-builds. For the nerds out there it wasn't uncommon to have multiple cards you would swap out because some games likes some cards more than others. By the late 90's that was mostly dead and it turned into ATi vs. Nvidia where neither was really better than the other. But Nvidia (almost) always was the superior and more expensive option on the high end, mid range is a shit flinging match where nothing mattered and everything sucked ass for decades, it wasn't until about 2010 that there was half decent midrange cards.
Now the dark depths of the bottom of the barrel cards are something to behold, I'm talking full slot cards that still manage to be shittier than on board graphics, cards that look more like a cheap wifi card than a GPU, these things are something to behold the monstrosities these companies managed to put out for an MSRP of $20 that's only purpose seemed to be "let the PC boot". Yet those same cards were found in the cheapest bottom of the barrel compaqs, HP, or dells you can find and boy are they stinky.

>>11976798 (OP)
"Back in the day"? Yeah, the Voodoo2 was the one to have, all the others were put to shame.

>>11976798 (OP)
Definitely Voodoo 2.
But if we're talking about the later ones, I think it's one of the lower-end Geforce FX, after all the craze that was the 4 Ti.

>>11976883
this was great for playing 2D on CRT TV, at least until the capacitors blew. it's how i did Stepmania and emulation at the time

>>11976849
>Nvidia (almost) always was the superior and more expensive option on the high end
Zoom zoom. In the 90s it was competitive on and off, but Voodoo cards were considered the gold standard and ATI was neck and neck with Nvidia. Then the Radeon 9700 Pro raped two entire generations of Nvidia cards in 2002, beating anything from the GeForce 4 and 5 series hands down. It wasn't until the GeForce 6 series in late 2004 that Nvidia actually began to dominate.
>it wasn't until about 2010 that there was half decent midrange cards
Another spectacularly retarded statement. There were fantastic mid-range cards even in the 90s. In fact, for years mid-range cards were mostly fully enabled GPUs, just downclocked. You could often overclock them with a simple software tweak and enjoy near-flagship performance for a large discount. Sometimes they were equipped with slower VRAM (the first Radeon and first GeForce had both SDR and DDR variants) or even a cucked memory bus, but you could close the gap again with overclocking and avoiding the gimped bus models.

>>11976883
>>11978072
This was the GPU in the first gaming PC I ever built. I remember going to Fry's electronics to track down an Svideo cable so I could configure my shitty RCA CRT as a second monitor. All so I could play the Star Fox 2 rom in ZSNES on a real TV, because for some reason I'd really got into playing Star Fox 1 over and over again on my SNES and I had no idea what a flash cart was if they even existed back then. I had a crappy Walmart USB controller with a "retractable" cord that I bought to drive/fly in GTA3/VC PC ports.

Good times. Card and the PC its in still work. I haven't done anything with it in years though because all my attempts at getting Windows 98 onto it for DOS compatibility have failed, it's just too new for that, and I have no need for an early XP machine.

>>11976798 (OP)
I "built" (as in, I assembled it from consumer parts rather than getting a prebuilt) my first PC in the early 2000s and I have no memory of how I made the decisions. I must have been reading websites and such but I have no memory of which ones. A lot of my choices must have been highly suboptimal because I bought a new AGP motherboard and GPU when it was on its last legs, so I imagine I was making dumb mistakes like that all through the build. I was probably very lucky that it was all compatible and that I didn't need to flash a bios or something.

It's so ludicrously easy to get it all right now.

>>11976883
I had FX 5700
It was ok... But at the time the tech was improving so fast it was soon obsolete

>>11977906
Awww yeah that's some good box art

>>11976798 (OP)
>Was there a kind of “console war” vibe over which graphics card brand was better, like we see with game companies or consoles?
there really wasn't. although there were competing brands, there's a clear winner on each "generation" and you can just plop that one in your machine. anything that supports vga goes in. best one during voodoo years? any voodoo card. best one after geforce 256 came out? those ones. this ati vs nvidia faggotry only came up recently (as in beyond /vr/ terms).

Whatever Voodoo card 3dfx was selling at the time if we're talking the 90s.

>>11978241
I had basically the same experience. I fell for Intel's marketing and bought a Prescott P4 over an Athlon 64 because muh clockspeed, didn't even get an LGA775 that might have had a chance of running a better processor later, and went with AGP over PCIe because a friend told me that AGP was designed for graphics and PCIe was just rebranded PCI which sucked for cards. I have to say that the Radeon X800 Pro card was awesome for the time.

>>11978063
>>11978139
>voodoo
Yes, everyone wanted the voodoo2. I remember after they shit the bed it alternated between Nvidia and ATI Rage as to what was considered desirable or bad on an almost release-by-release basis. And mobile gpus were so bad you were guaranteed barebones gaming on any laptop or at least getting hot to the touch. I had a titanium PowerBook g4 back in like 2001, when Apple was trying to hype their gaming capabilities and it always got hot and ran slow even on games they highlighted on their website as “perfect for Macs.” I know, I know, my fault for gaming on a Mac…

I didn't start gaming on PC until a few years ago. Is it true that back then even high-end cards could get obsolete in just a couple of years?
By obsolete I don't mean it couldn't run the latest games on the highest settings, but that it couldn't run those games at all. Graphics certainly seemed to advance at a much faster pace back then, still that sounds crazy.

>>11981840
The biggest difference was that high end cards didn't cost 4 digits, only top of the line multi gpu cards a dollar under a grand. The sweetspot of $200 in late 2000s to early 2010s (before first crypto mine craze) was insane value-wise, as in a $200 card was 80-90% as good as a high end $500 card.

>>11981840
Anything you could buy in 1996 (video cards) was nearly useless in 1999. E.g. my S3 Virge 2 Mb was non-existent for 3D games. At the same time, Voodoo 1/2 could be a game changer for properly old video cards even from some 1995. That was an interesting time indeed.

>>11981840
Yes many games games ran on old cards if you could stomach 10-15 fps at lowest settings. Some games even got modded to support older cards better like Oldblivion. Maybe 4-5 years before a graphics card stopped running new games

Please can someone give me usefulness

>>11983379
Define usefulness, and I can try

>>11976798 (OP)
>Was there a kind of “console war” vibe over which graphics card brand was better, like we see with game companies or consoles?
Yes, in fact that still happens to this day.