[Retrohardware] Your favourites retro graphic card

My favs are probably Matrox G200 and G400. They made some beautiful output and had just wicked 2D for the day. Fast and crystal clear. I remember comparing my G400 to a GF256. The GF had such horrible output quality across the board, in comparison, that I found it just laughable. Skipped that generation because of that and waited for the Radeon 7200 LE bargain board before upgrading.

Otherwise, maybe my old ET4000/W32p (Hercules Dynamite Power VLB) cuz it was way fast for my DOS games back then. Or maybe my old Orchid Righteous 3D (Voodoo1) with its mechanical relays (click click!!). Voodoo1 was such an amazing piece of work. Talk about revolutionizing PC gaming.

I also had a Verite V2100 (Diamond Stealth II S220) for a while. It was a decent card with better-than-Voodoo image quality. But, it had some really rough drivers.

 

3dfx Voodoo 2 sli rocked back in the days!

If we're talking even older stuff I'd have to say the Amiga 500 and after that the Amiga 1200! (Sheeshe I don't even remember what those graphics chips where called anymore lol)

 

3dfx Voodoo 1. Nothing changed gaming experience more then this card to me.
Best piece of hardware i boought for a computer.
Had it paired with the also aweome Matrox Millenium.

 

ATi Rage Fury MAXX

 

My Canopus Voodoo 2 and Matrox G400 were probably the two that got me the most excited.

 

My Matrox Mystique 220 and Deltron Realvision Flash3D (Voodoo1) were sublime together.

 

Hmm, favorite was my Voodoo 1 and STB Lightning 128 (ET6000 chip). Very, very fond memories of those two working perfectly together. The first game that REALLY caught my attention was Archimedean Dynasty for 3Dfx (I had played through it in software mode, and fully accelerated and filtered Glide mode was something else).

After that... somewhat of a tossup. The GeForce 4 Ti 4600 was a good one, while the Radeon 9700 Pro was a lot of fun for obvious reasons. I also really enjoyed the Voodoo 5 5500, Voodoo 3, and ATI Rage 128. But my fondest memories go back to my first Orchid Righteous 3D. Truly a tremendous product at the time.

 

My favorite was the Voodoo 1.

The most exotic was the first Radeon with EMBM, etc... and the ARK demo ahead of its time.

 

One thing that I must say I will never forget is the transformation that Fifa '98 took on when I installed my Voodoo2 , besides looking far better the cpu was freed up to do all sorts of stuff and suddenly the Ai became more competitive and stylish , executing all sorts of special moves .

The glide effects in Wing Commander 5 Prophecy were also quite good .............................. oh where oh where is my DX10 Wing Commander Sequel ?

 

Diamond Stealth S220 II w/ 4MB RAM: Rendition Verite 2100 Although I would've like to have had the Hercules Thriller 3D w/ 8MB RAM: Rendition Verite 2200

Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 w/ 64MB RAM: PowerVR|STM Kyro II; although I would've liked the 4800, which only a few fansite bods received - but not me; or one of these. Looks like that card may have final Kyro drivers available too.

My 9800XT is a retro card that is still going strong - no problems ever. Does that count?

 

I still have my Matrox M3D and an Oak Warp 5. Both TBDR's. If they could have just gotten alphablending working on the Warp5, it would have been a very interesting card.

 

ATI Rage II +DVD 4 meg PCI. This was befor AGP and ran DVD very good at the time.

 

eh, retro? The first graphics card I started off with was an Intel 810....

If we don't talk retro, I thought I had achieved an enormous increase in performance when I got a GeForce4 MX 440-8X, but that was before I got my FX card. The FX 5900 made the biggest performance and quality difference (after I installed the 52.16 drivers) for me, I still remember the happy memories of those days in December 2003 when I held that card on my hands. Now I have a GeForce 6800 GT, and I love it, but it wasn't quite the same upgrade as from the MX to the 5900

To be honest, I wanted an FX 5800U but I couldn't find one for a decent price so I had the choice of 5800NU or 5900NU and I took 5900NU. Its architecture was also something else, maybe it would have been better had it been released earlier...

 

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?p=658075

There's the pictures I posted of mine a while back. It was an interesting card, but the drivers were horrible of course.

 

I have craploads of old hardware around. Just the "fascinating" stuff.

For example, right now, I have a few machines built:

AMD 5x86 160 MHz machine, 32 MB FPM RAM, Promise Ultra66, IBM Deathstar (hehe!), Diamond Stealth II S220 4MB PCI, Philips Seismic Edge PCI, Ensoniq Soundscape ISA, 3Com 3C509 ISA. On some MSI PCI/ISA-based 486 mobo.

Intel PPRO 233 1MB L2, 128MB EDO, 13 GB Quantum Fireball Plus KX, Matrox Mystique 220 4MB, Orchid Righteous 3D, Diamond Monster Sound MX300 PCI w/ Roland SCD-15 DB, some PCI NIC. Cool Intel VS440FX mobo.

Other hardware around, including all P3 cores. Lots of weird CPUs like Winchip 2, K6-III+, Pentium Overdrive for 486 boards, Cyrix 5x86, and a rare AMD K5-PR200. Tons of video cards and sound cards. People end up giving me hand me downs and I just keep em cuz they're really basically worthless.

The only thing I do not have and have really not messed much with in general is a P4. I just don't get any P4 hardware. I personally have never owned any because I stayed away from it, as an educated buyer.

Just 2 days ago I was messing with Vquake and Diablo on that "speed demon" 486. It's kinda neat to have an Ultra66 in a 486. Back in the day that would only have been possible with like the top top end SCSI hardware in RAID 0 or some such lol. Hell it was tough to just get DMA to HDD back then.

I'm still watching eBay occasionally for a VLB board that will fully support a Am5x86. They are rather rare. The writeback L1 cache on the CPU screws with most VLB chipsets.

 

Amiga 500: ECS
Amiga 1200: AGA

I owned both, the latter fittet with Co-Cpu, FPU, FAST-RAM and a 2.5" 240 MB HD
The I changed to a 486DX4, and I really felt like a downgrade.
And took me some time to get the hang of having to tweak the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get more than 600KB basemem free so I could run Tornado...even if I had 16 MB RAM.

Took me a long time(as an avid Amiga user)to even like the PC.

I still miss my RAM-drive and Workbench at times, even to this date.

 

that AMD 5x86 rig is the kind of PC I only can dream of . running windows 95c ?

could you put a gigabyte I-RAM on your 486 and use it for swap (or host the OS + swap)? can you run firefox (or K-meleon)