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What was the most "successful" Enthusiast Card ever?

Greebo said:
3dfx voodoo1 - Only cost just over £100 from memory
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It ended up costing this, and thats what I paid for mine in a shop. But the first mention of it I saw the previous year was both the V1 and the Power VR boards costing £160+. More than a dozen years of inflation, and thats a release price of £225+.

And you still needed £75-£100 worth of Matrox/S3 2D graphics card to play things like Baldurs Gate.
 
Greebo said:
3dfx Voodoo1 - The start of 3d gaming on the PC and I even today I have never been as blown away as when I first got my voodoo1 card. Again perhaps we will never see such a big change in computer graphics again. Quake and tombraider were memorable.
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+++++++++1

That brings back some memories, playing Tomb Raider or Quake non stop for 15 hours+ :D
 
Whilst I want to say the Voodoo 1, I'm not going to. It made such an awesome difference to games though, Glide Carmageddon, win. :D

My vote is for the Radeon 9700. At release there was nothing else that could come remotely close. A fantastic card in it's day.
 
Pottsey said:
Can I give 3DFX a -vote? 3DFX was not the start of the 3Dcard market
As much as I like the Kyro I would have to vote for either the ATI 9700pro or GTX8800 both of which gave a massive jump over older generations and both lasted ages.
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Although it wasn't the start of the 3d market, it was the best implemented and taken up en mass which then brought more and more 3d games out. Lets look at the previous 3d cards to the voodoo shall we?

S3 ViRGE - performance so bad that people with highend cpu's could do better using the cpu which lead to the card being unaffectionate dubbed the first 3D decelerator.

ATI Rage 3D - Again, a very very poor performing card and didn't sell well.

Rendition Verite 1000 - Now this should have been the great launch of 3d gaming and in fact Quake was expected to shine on it
Carmack stated "Verite will be the premier platform for Quake
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.Poor 2D performance proved problematic for the board, as did programming for the Verite. It was the latter which Carmack would later say led to iD's decision to move away from proprietary APIs to OpenGL. This card was launched at about the same time as the voodoo 1.

So that brings us nicely to the Voodoo1. A great performing 3d only card which meant you could have a decent 2d card of your choice in your pc with the voodoo1 handling just the 3d. This brought 3d gaming to the masses and sold by the bucket load. Once Quake went to OpenGL it was game over for the poorer performing and image quality 3d cards.

Riva 128 was almost a year after the voodoo1 and image quality wasn't a patch on the voodoo 1. ATI Rage pro came out but was disappointing and didn't sell hardly at all. I could list lots more cards in 1997 and 1998 which were failures due to dodgy driver support or bad design so the voodoo 1 and 2 reigned supreme for 2 or 3 years.

So which are these fantastic 3d cards which were better than the voodoo1 in 1997 as I can't remember them (I am getting old now though ;))

ANyway the OP's question is more successful euthiasiast card and none of the competition to the voodoo can fall into the category as they weren't successful.
 
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Nvidia FX 5 series...

sorry i'll leave lol :p




I'd probably say the Voodoo 1+2 cards closely followed by the 8800gt, Nvidia got it right with that card in terms of price vs performance
 
Got to be 8800gtx. A goodfriend of mine is still using one under water. And its still copes with todays games. He wont upgrade untill the thing dies!!!
 
Fonz-Valo said:
Nvidia FX 5 series...

sorry i'll leave lol :p




I'd probably say the Voodoo 1+2 cards closely followed by the 8800gt, Nvidia got it right with that card in terms of price vs performance
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Lol, my Geforce FX5200 is still going. It plays games like KotOR [max detail] and MoH: Airborne [low detail], legendary card.
 
Greebo Said “So which are these fantastic 3d cards which were better than the voodoo1 in 1997 as I can't remember them (I am getting old now though )”
I always liked the Matrox M3D and other PowerVR cards. They ran Quake in 24-bit colour which effectively looks as good as 32-bit colour making Quake run both fast and look better than a Voodoo 1. Many other games ran better and looked better than Voodoo cards. Ultimate Race Pro is one game that springs to mind which had some nice Light volumes/Real time shadows and 24-bit colour. Unreal is another game that was better with PowerVR.

As I had a M3D and other cards so a Voodoo for me was a step backwards and for sure not a massive jump forward. I remember seeing Quake 1 on my brothers Voodoo and going what’s the fuss, its only 16-bit colour and looks much worse then what I already have.




Greebo said “ANyway the OP's question is more successful euthiasiast card and none of the competition to the voodoo can fall into the category as they weren't successful.”
PowerVR was successful anyway my main point wasn’t that a Voodoo wasn’t successful. It was the reason it was successful is not the same as people are saying. It wasn’t the start of the 3Dcard market; it wasn’t a giant leap forward looking as it looked no better than the competition and often worse. It was successful due to marketing and lots of game support.

Voodoo 1 certainly was successful I just don’t see it as the start of the market or a giant leap forward. Or to put it another way, by the time the Voodoo 1 came out in 1997 we already had many 3Dgames for years and were up to DirectX 5. Tomb Raider, MechWarrior 2 and Quake all predated Voodoo 1. There were other good 3dgames that that predate a Voodoo.
 
well i thought the power vr card was great first time i saw quake 2 in glide was jawdropping at the time

this had the most impact on gaming for me before this card is was graphic adventures and eye of the beholder for me lol

then it was the radeon 9700 pro happy mechwarrior days, had this card for like 3 years i was that happy with it

and then it was the 8800 gtx for me a nice little overclock too

and now it has to be the gtx 4** series never know a series of cards to overclock so well

i know this is a bit off track but why do people complain about the price of the new 580 gtx when the 8800gtx was around the same price or higher when it was relaeased
 
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