Nvidia 6800 GT/ULTRA the coolest card I ever bought.
Following on from the 9700 Pro (ati) days.
Was a good time in industry too (2004) with the likes of doom 3/ Half Life 2, Far Cry/Crysis etc all around the scene or on the horizon.
Shit just seemed better back then....
I kinda missed out on early PC Gaming (as an owner), but I'm sure those early days into accelerated graphic via voodoo/3dfx would have been special too.
I much preferred it when game worlds actually looked like they were made of polygons. These days they've kinda of gone too far, and its a bit like a pretty girl wearing too much make up on the basis that more make up = prettier, when in fact, its more make up = more fake.
Watching the daytona usa, ridge racer intros in the arcade as a teenager blew my mind way more than anything I have seen in a long time.
My greatest impression of video card upgrade is upgrade geforce 2mx to geforce 3ti. Many games with 3ti card have new effects, Halo, NFS underground. I do not remember the impressions stronger than this upgrade.
I had a lot of upgrades, here's the list: riva tnt - riva tnt 2 pro - geforce 2mx - geforce 3ti200 - radeon 9600 - radeon 9800pro - geforce 6800LE - radeon x850xt - radeon hd2900xt - geforce 8800gts 640 - radeon 3870x2 - geforce gtx280 - radeon 4870x2 - radeon 5970 - radeon hd 6990 - geforce gtx480 - radeon r9 290x
Amd for those who have problems with money. I do not have enough money. 2 years ago I bought a 290x for ~260$ on the second hand market. The price of the gtx780 (non ti) was ~320$ or more in the second hand 2 years ago . It would be better if I bought a 780ti if I had enough money. But now I do not regret. Now the 780ti is almost everywhere worse than 290x
Long term nvidia fair worse than amd. They optimize quite good the drivers to squize performance while amd goes the "brute force" way. That's moslty(and ofc architecture) the reason why on paper amd should destroy the nvidia counterpart, but it doesn't and it's even behind. But when time goes by, nvidia drops the real optimizations in their drivers + game devs optimize for nv new cards leading to a lot less impresive performance while the radeons are aging a lot better having the brute force into them + amd themself are updating the drivers for the older cards a lot better leading to small gains.
Had both nvidia and ati/amd cards and while I respect what nvidia is doing in terms of performance, I would say if one want's to keep his card for more than 1-2 years to go for radeon vc. Vega is promising, can't wait. Currently I use 390@1060MHz(rock solid even on occt, otherwise for games I can hit rock solid 1090MHz) and tbh it's quite powerful even on my old cpu, soon to be changed.
Nowadays the HD7970 GHZ (aka R9 280X) is as fast or faster than the 780/ti in more recent games. Look at the Fury X, in doom vulkan that thing flies close to the gtx 1080.
Nvidia are impostors. Nvidia brought ageia Physx to bring the evolution of game physics to a halt. Because it was obvious that you could not fully develop and implement into games two antagonistic currents (antagonistic because the graphics and the physics put together into one hardware card, the two concepts would fight each other for PC resources). Now I understand that they did not make the games themselves but by removing the dedicated physics card to implement the instructions into their graphic cards they forced game creators to think twice about the fps when designing their games with physics in mind.
And I use gtx950 not ati radeon but my displease is in strict regard to what they did to the general evolution of physix in games -because whatever they implement or dictate, game creators follow.
If I'd be in the gov I'd sue the company for using corporatist techniques against technological evolution for that matter, for with power there comes responsibility.
I would have loved a graph showing the "real performance index" on a logarithmic scale with the years under those. With extra marking for showing the steps between shading models / advancemements in compute capabilities.
In the stats page the rops / tmus / any fixed-function units have changed a lot during the years, and writing a number for those just really doesn't mean much.