What Is Your Personal Favorite Video Card of All Time?

The first Game Changer I ever had was the Quantum 3d X-24. 2 Voodoo 2's on one card. I still have it sitting in a box. I was playing glide and dx games at 1024x768 when most were still at 640x480. GL Quake was awesome on it and Unreal was...... .Unreal. When Everquest came out, I could play Full Screen at 1024x768 and not have that limited small screen EQ had back then. It was pretty awesome card for the time.

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Yeah, I remember getting Unreal and just watching the intro for like 2 hours at a time. Don't think I ever even played the game.
 
My favorite was mu 9800GTX. It was the first real gpu I bought. Played tons of hours on it. My current favorite I'd My 1080ti Gigabyte Arous Waterforce.
 
Voodoo Rush 12 MB followed by Voodoo Banshee 16 MB followed by Voodoo 3500TV.

3dfx > *
 
All these recent posts about Voodoo cards and I just finished building my "Retro" PC from old parts I have laying around... Also looking at replacing the caps on my old Soyo KT880 board as I need it to run my Voodoo 3 AGP card (3.3V). My MSI K7n2 Delta nForce 2 board only supports AGP 1.5V & 0.8V.
 
Gigabyte Windforce 7950 OC before they revised it and killed/locked voltage.

I ran it at 1250core/1250 mem 24/7/365 doing Distributive Computing and the temps were always nice and cool.
 
Geforce 4 Ti 4200.

I've had:
Nvidia TNT2 in 2000
Power VR Kyro 2 2002
Geforce 4 MX440 2003
Geforce 4 Ti 4200 2004
Geforce 7800GS 2006 (last and fastest AGP?)
Geforce 9800 GT 2008
Geforce GTX285 2009
Geforce GTX580 2010
Geforce GTX680 2012
Geforce GTX780 2013
Geforce GTX780 Ti 2014
Geforce 1080 Ti 2017
Geforce RTX2080 2017
Geforce RTX3080 2021

I wonder did I forget any.
 
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The GTX 680 is probably the last GPU that I didn't feel like I got shafted when I bought it. It is probably my favorite.
 
My current card, the RTX 2070. I have it for 3 years now, tied with the 980 Ti in longevity, but with no signs of being able to replace it anytime soon. Even today, I literally cannot buy a card of similar performance for what I bought the RTX 2070 back in 2018. Still kicking myself for not going for the 2080 back then, even though it would have made a big dent in my savings at the time.
 
My favorite card is probably the 8800GT which was the first time I had a card where I didn't feel I needed to upgrade within 12 months of the card launching and it didn't break the bank either. E.g. geforce 3 had low framerates in a lot of titles 6 months after launch and voodoo had low FPS all the time. Did love my voodoo card though as it was the first time I had a 3d accelerator and the graphics were mindblowing at the time.
 
XFX 9600gt got me through the first year or so of college. Although I am a big fan of my 3090 FE with a waterblock on it.
 
My current 3090 FE for multiple reasons. Its the first time i've owned a truly top spec card from any generation in the last 15 years of buying GPU's. Secondly, the physical product itself has been the most impressive item to unbox, handle, and now look at inside my case. Just holding it felt so damn substantial and impressive.
 
DFenz said:
The GTX 680 is probably the last GPU that I didn't feel like I got shafted when I bought it. It is probably my favorite.
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You should feel shafted because it was $499 for a 60-class chip branded as an 80-class card...at a time when the 60-class card was $200-$250. And this first-gen Kepler was basically the start of prices getting wack when comparing to what you go before for same money.
 
I also ran Sli Evga 7900GTO's .. we use to drop coin back then also .. but I miss the days when Nvida did chipsets for AMD ..
 
Sir Beregond said:
You should feel shafted because it was $499 for a 60-class chip branded as an 80-class card...at a time when the 60-class card was $200-$250. And this first-gen Kepler was basically the start of prices getting wack when comparing to what you go before for same money.
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I disagree. The GTX 680, though a comparatively smaller chip than Fermi and Tahiti, was punching above it's weight by beating them and competing at the high-end level at the time of its launch.

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On topic: my favorite GPU of all time is still the 8800GT
 
DFenz said:
The GTX 680 is probably the last GPU that I didn't feel like I got shafted when I bought it. It is probably my favorite.
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Are you kidding me? That's when the price increases started with both AMD and Nvidia releasing mid range parts at high end prices.

Sir Beregond said:
You should feel shafted because it was $499 for a 60-class chip branded as an 80-class card...at a time when the 60-class card was $200-$250. And this first-gen Kepler was basically the start of prices getting wack when comparing to what you go before for same money.
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Exactly this!!

jologskyblues said:
I disagree. The GTX 680, though a comparatively smaller chip than Fermi and Tahiti, was punching above it's weight by beating them and competing at the high-end level at the time of its launch.
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You would be wrong. The benchmark from your post proves what Sir. Beregond said. Look at the scores for the 580 vs 680, 84% vs 100% Are you really calling the GTX 680 high when it could only beat the high end Fermi card by 16% despite new process and a die shrink? I wouldn't call that punching above it's weight. Beating Tahiti was no great shake either as the 7970 was only a mid range card too.
 
8800GT has to be the best card of all time; absolutely crushed contemporary titles and wasn't very expensive.

That said, my favorite setup was my dual GTX295s in Quad SLI. I had a peltier and water cooled OC'd quad core paired with that and pulled around a thousand watts from the wall while benchmarking. Totally ridiculous and the SLI scaling wasn't great. I did have good luck though and largely avoided microstutter issues.
 
The best gaming card I ever had was my Geforce 2 GTS. 32MB of Vram and AGP 4X, and it was the first time I could run games with 32 bit color instead of 16 bit. It was truly a literal game changer for me, I had so many hours of fun playing games with that thing.
 
jologskyblues said:
I disagree. The GTX 680, though a comparatively smaller chip than Fermi and Tahiti, was punching above it's weight by beating them and competing at the high-end level at the time of its launch.

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On topic: my favorite GPU of all time is still the 8800GT
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You really need to put on the glasses of what the GPU market was back then and not look at it from what we get now.

The GTX 580 is what you would class as the "full chip" card. It was $500 and it had about a 50-60% boost of performance over the previous gen GTX 280. So how is them taking what was clearly the mid-range chip for Kepler, branding it as an 80-class card and selling it for $500 at merely a 16% performance increase (per your chart) over the 580 a win? The actual full chip Kepler didn't come until the GTX 780 Ti. But before they released that, they had the gall to have the first $1k GPU in the form of the Titan which wasn't even the full chip.

I had a GTX 670 at the time. You'll forgive me if knowing what I know now, and seeing how screwed the GPU market has gotten, I don't look back favorably at where it all started going wrong. Mid-range cards got shifted into what had previously been the top card branding and pricing (i.e. selling mid-range chips as high end 80-class cards at $500-$650) with the actual full chips coming later as Titan and 80Ti cards at $700-$2500 prices (depending on the gen). And I'm specifically calling out Nvidia here, but AMD did the same thing. The 7970 was clearly a mid-range card branded and priced at $550 when it launched and that really enabled Nvidia to follow suit with Kepler and taking what would have been the GTX 660 and instead making it the GTX 680 and pricing it as such. And it's all history since then for every generation of cards since Kepler.
 
Hmm, my 7950 GX2 was the most unique card but I'd probably give the nod to my 8800 GTX. I spent so much time playing Oblivion with that card, then eventually upgraded to SLI.
 
1. 9800 xt. It was the first time I purchased the top dog of the pack.
1a. 6950, which bippity boppity and a bios swapity became a 6970 within minutes of its first power on cycle.
 
GTX 970, followed by GTX 1070. 970 was such a good value, and the 970/1070 have great performance.
 
I have to say my now current favorite has got to be my 2080ti Kingpin. Never have I owned such a iconic card as this.
 

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III_Slyflyer_III said:
All these recent posts about Voodoo cards and I just finished building my "Retro" PC from old parts I have laying around... Also looking at replacing the caps on my old Soyo KT880 board as I need it to run my Voodoo 3 AGP card (3.3V). My MSI K7n2 Delta nForce 2 board only supports AGP 1.5V & 0.8V.
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Soyo, that’s a blast from the past…
 
Flogger23m said:
GTX 970, followed by GTX 1070. 970 was such a good value, and the 970/1070 have great performance.
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Yeah, the GTX 970 was great. I rocked that on my second rig for a while. Until I bought a 4K TV and realized how intense 4K was (and went on to purchase a Titan X).

But I'm really loving the RTX 3060. It can run 4K well, even at high refresh (I have 4K 144Hz). At $329, it would have been one of the best cards of all time.
 
My fave was probably the Diamond Viper V770 (Riva TNT2). Upgraded from a Riva128ZX which had image quality that was an atrocity.

Following that I'd probably say the GeForce 9600GT. Was a pretty good bargain at the time.
 
Randall Stephens said:
Soyo, that’s a blast from the past…
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Yes at approximately 1998, then ABIT become the king, and two years later ASUS started to impress the market.

Back on topic.
I was there too at 1996, when computers an tool for the banking system, this started to get converted in hardware so to gain the name of PC (personal computer).
People with technical training (electrical electronics) along computer training since 1988, we are the ones getting involved at computer case modding.
We were the first ones, capable to understand the importance of VGA cooling systems.
The entire GPU road-map (1995~2021) this is historically recorded, what it is not recorded, this is which cards come out with exceptional cooling solution (extreme technological innovation).
Sapphire HD5770 Vapor-X this one of those miracles.
And in more recent times, MSI GTX1060 OC 6GB iGAMER, this is something also very impressive.
Both of those cards received lots of awards, but in the reality, the awards are for the engineers whom spend hundreds of hours at testing and improving the GPU cooler, so this to do equal great job, at cooling down GPU Plus PCB.

Modern times 2016 and later, the Chinese industry flooded the market with low-end GPU coolers, cost-effectiveness and faster to produce.
Before, Taiwanese was leading as innovators, but technology innovations never included cost-effectiveness in mind as priority.
Today Taiwanese industry, changed it market focus, GPU cooling solutions become OEM work for B2B, occasionally such excellent work appear at few VGA cards, recent example the ASUS RTX3060 Ti V2 MINI
 
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1080Ti, had 3 of these puppies at one point. Then i sold them to get a 2080ti. The 2080ti is good but to be perfectly honest with you I should have just stayed with my 1080ti's
 
Right now? My GTX 670, rocking the extra vRAM: 4GB, baby.

Oh, you noticed I said, "GTX 670"? Yeah, that's right. It's running my basement streaming rig...because the prices on new GPUs are ridiculous. So, it's my oldest GPU that's still running and it's doing a fine job.
 
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