My Hardware - Video Cards

Until the day I bought my Voodoo 2, I had never thought that PC screens could look so nice. Before, I (like you, probably) had always been used to those good old blocky pixels in 320x200, or a scant few 640x480 games. All of a sudden, I saw my video card in a different light. Without changing my CPU, I had suddenly changed my whole gaming experience.

But let me show you the growth here :

	Date	Element	Bus
	July 1992	Orchid Farenheit 1280 1Mb	ISA
	July 1995	Diamond Stealth 2Mb DRAM	PCI
	April 1997	Matrox Mystique 2Mb	PCI
	June 1998	Creative Labs 3Dfx Voodoo 2	PCI
	September 1999	Nvidia Riva TNT2 16Mb	AGP
	June 2000	ATI Xpert@Play 8Mb	AGP
	July 2000	Creative Labs GeForce 2 GTS 64Mb	AGP
	August 2000	Creative Labs GeForce 2 GTS 32Mb	AGP
	September 2001	PixelView GeForce 3	AGP
	2002	MSI GeForce 4 Ti4400 128Mb	AGP
	October 2003	Hercules ATI Radeon 9800 Pro	AGP
	January 2005	Gainward GeForce 6800 Ultra Golden Sample	AGP

As you may see, before 1992 I had no interest in my graphics cards. They went with the CPU, end of story. But in 1992 I finally paid attantion to the sirens of performance and forked out the $234 necessary for trying a new approach to computing. And I was happy with my F1280 at the time - Windows 3.1 did go faster, notably faster.

Once having took note that the CPU is not, after all, the sole provider of performance, I started looking out for more data on that subject. The Diamond card ($208) was the result of a gamble : a new motherboard to take advantage of that curious new slot standard : PCI, and a graphics card to go with it. The result was astonishing, Windows performance was boosted through the roof and even some games took advantage of it. But gaming was still a very slow affair on the PC. There were no titles that allowed you to race through tracks with a high-speed car and make it feel right.

In 1996 I got my first Pentium CPU, and in 1997 I got the Mystique. For me, that was the start of culminating power under Windows. Matrox is very good when it comes to 2D rendering and I appreciated the possibilities it gave. But I was quite unhappy with the 3D performance it claimed to give. There was none. As proof, Matrox delivered the M3D, a Mystique add-on card which gave lame 3D performance thanks to the PowerVR chip. But it allowed me to discover Quake II in a whole new light, and enjoy MechWarrior II to no end. So I won't wish Matrox to Hell for all eternity, I'll just hate them until I die. I made the mistake of believing the PR crap and ended up having to buy 2 cards for what I wanted. And no driver updates either. That stinks, Matrox, and I told you so.

True happiness came to my gaming lust with the Voodoo 2. Wondrous graphics and a sense of power never attained before washed over me. It was paradise. The promise that more powerful CPUs would only boost my Voodoo 2s performance was the cherry on the cake. The cake lasted barely fifteen months.

Indeed, the AGP standard hit the gaming world in 1999 and took it by storm. No Voodoo 2, whatever the platform, could hope to compete with the TNT2 on AGP. I believe that the major part in NVidia's success at that time was adapting to AGP before 3Dfx, with a product at least as good as the Voodoo 2. Even the on-board Intel 712 chip, lame as it was, had better framerates just because it was on AGP. Exit the Voodoo card stage left. Welcome to the reign of NVidia in my world.

As usual, things accelerated after 1998. In the first 15 years (yikes!) I bought four video cards; two because I had to, two because I wanted to. In the following four years, I bought no less than seven, only one because I had to (the ATI Rage card came with the Celeron in a bundle and I never used it).