[Retrohardware] Your least favorite graphic card

Really? The FX 5800 blew me away.

I'm gonna be controversial and say for me its got to be the X1900 Crossfire setup I had.
Just couldn't get it working, even with just one card I was getting random reboots, two saw the machine crash as soon as I tried to run any 3D.

Traded them in for a 7950GX2 which would probably be the second worst, I'm not a multi-GPU fan.

 

Not just one card but a series of cards for me. Let me put it this way, I will never buy BFG again.

Purchased a AGP 6800OC 128MB card. This card worked fine for around 6 months, at the time I sold the card to a friend. One night later I receive a phone calling with my friend saying the card is having tons of errors with "snow" on the screen. I always hold good on my deals and told him to mail him back, I'd take care of shipping. Got the card back, looked fine, put it in my rig and of course I clearly see the errors. Call up BFG (at least the tech support was not out sourced) and got an RMA, great it was easy maybe something happened, etc.

New card arrives on a Friday (RMA was sent on a Tuesday), open package, card looks just fine. Pop it in, this time it is clearly the core that is gone this time. Call BFG back up the same day, here's where it gets a bit hairy. To cut down to it I was basically accused of screwing the card up by tech support who clearly had no clue what he was talking about. Finally after talking to management I got another RMA. Sent card on a Saturday, "new" card arrived the following Wednesday.

This time I opened up the package and was rather shocked what I saw. The mounting bracket was off, a screw was gone that held it in place. Two screws from the metal bracket on the back of the card were gone. Heatsink was extremely lose and to top it off the molex connector on the card had one horribly bent pin. I thought it was a joke, seriously I could only laugh. It was not worth putting it into my rig, but I did anyone, nothing not even a screen appeared. Called back up, this time I just asked to speak to a higher up right away, RMA'd.

New card arrived the next Monday, opened package and there was a new 6800GS. "How nice" was all that I could say, thankful for the upgrade but after what I had been through I think one of those new (had recently launched) GeForce 7 cards would have been better. Anyway, this card worked.. sorta. No image issues, ran well but at the time Nvidia did not have a driver that would work. Official release? Nope. Even beta? Nope. I looked on the web and after several hours of testing (without working drivers mind you) I found a random third-party beta driver for Nvidia cards.. worked! Finally!

Just to put it lightly I still hold a bit of a grudge against BFG for that experience and simply do not recommend their cards to anyone. The only nice touch was that I never was on the phone with someone from India, and therefore it was easy to communicate other than typical tech support ignorance.

 

Hmmm... least favorite video card... let's see -
nah, the 9800SE AIW was good-ish (it wasn't the card's fault MMC sucked so much)
I loved the GF4 Ti4200 to death, of course
the GF256 SDR was a bit slow and ran white hot, but was otherwise problem free
the Savage cards gave me 3D, it didn't even pass my mind I could criticize them
...
so, yeah, Trio3D, definitely.

God, how I - naively - tried to wrestle *something* out of that card... and I had it for like a year and a half, too, until I could finally afford 3D acceleration in early '99...

 

Ok, the worst video card ever was the Cirrus Logic Laguna3d. 4 megs of Rambus (It's gotta be fast!!) and completely incompatible with the earlier CL cards. The drivers always sucked, and the 3D features never, ever worked. The cards I got to work with all hard locked the PC if they overheated.

Anything from SiS has got to qualify too, with their "crank down the quality since we are slow" drivers.

Cards I've had and didn't think were that bad:

Voodoo Rush: Worked fine for me, just was very pissed at paying more for less than VooDoo performence.

Matrox Mystique: Many, many hours playing Mechwarrior2 on that card. Filtering would have been nice.

ATI Rage128: Maybe I'm the oddity, but I never had driver problems with mine.

 

The Kyro I probably tops the list with its 256 MB main memory limitation. S3 Virge is also another candidate for the top slot due to the horrible performance.

 

Thinking about the worst card I've another winner...

and it is....




the NEOMAGIC 256AV...

Oh my God what a tremendous chip... it was used by low power notebook and it has got some 3D capabilities that CANNOT be used in any way.. Direct3D acceleration only by software.. and 2,5 MB on die memory... who tried it know what I'm talking about.

 

AFAIK neomagic chips have no 3d capabilities AT ALL, so no wonder d3d "acceleration" is in software. The only exception would be the newest one, neomagic 256xl+, which seems to have some (very slow) 3d support, though I'm unsure if it actually worked...
It was difficult to get a notebook with (somewhat useable at least) 3d support these times...

 

Ditto. My machine wouldn't boot with it one time in two. Replaced it with an STB TNT.

 

Yeah also if someone told that a litlle 3D support has been inserted inside Neomagic first chip.. Someone tell that has seen HW acceleration cube on Direct3D with some sort of strange Dx installation combination.

I've good experience with a Dell C600 and Rage Pro 128 chip.. very good acceleration with only 8MB on board SDRAM memory.

 

I probably have reason to run away now...worst card ever x1900xtx 512 MB. Why!?! Because it is only the second card ever to fail on me, the first beeing a FX5600 with a fan that quit, 2 weeks later the chip burnt out (but for 2 weeks I had a very silent PC!). OK, so the 5600 was my fault, but the recently deceased 1900 is attributed to RAM-failure. The list in my case goes Matrox Mystique 4 MB, Voodoo 2 12 MB, FX5600 256 MB x2 (Allright, you can laugh now ), x850xt PE, x1900xtx 512 mb.
And which am I the most pleased with!? Why my latest of course!! The x1900xtx......which I hope will be replaced soon through RMA.

 

how can you be pleased with a broken card.

 

I'd have to say the Voodoo Rush for my part.
I missed out on the first driver that couldn't run GLQuake, but I was just in time for the driver iteration that gave you a BSOD if you did exotic stuff in Windows. BTW, dragging a file counted as exotic.
Oh, and it was expensive and slow and didn't work in NT4.

 

Because it was great before it broke. Card failure will happen at some point, and if its during the warranty that's why you get a free replacement.

 

I got a fair few that miffed me off over the years, but 2 of particular mention are:

1). Number Nine Revolution IV, brought back in 1997/98. Absolutely horrendous 3d support and the drivers are my worst PC experience to date. I even sold a few of them to naive customers and told them it was a cutting edge multimedia experience for 3D gaming.... LMAO!

2). Nvidia GeforceFX 5900 Ultra. Cost me a bomb, but it got totally owned a few weeks later by a cheap ass ATI Radeon. I was not impressed at all, so I sold it on and defected to ATI for 12 months.

 

You're a bad bad man

 

I really disliked the Trident 8900C ISA card that came with my 486. It was vastly outperformed by a mere Cirrus Logic 5426 ISA. TIE Fighter was unplayable in SVGA on the Trident, but fully playable on the CL.

Retro energy.

 

Tie Fighter was awesome. I wore out two mice playing that. I had a Cirrus Logic VLB card in my 486 for that though.

 

For me: Riva 128 - my first 3D-card. A month later I added a Voodoo Graphics which made me happy for a while.

Second least favourite was an 8-MiB-Voodoo2. Had nothing to do with the hardware but somehow i felt like a second class citizen compared to my buddies with a 12-MByte-Version. Returned it and upgrade to 12 MByte with no additional cost though (thanks to a massive price drop in the meantime).

 

For the record.... 3d Blaster Savage 4. I got ripped off on that card from the guy who initially sold it to me to the day it wasn't supported anymore.

 

Matrox Parhelia.....Although I never owned it, I was definitely anxious to see what Matrox had been working on for so long. Man, what a disappointment when that thing finally came to market...Granted, the 3-display bit was cool and all. However, the 3D performance was sub-par to say the least...