Graphics cards that made you go "WOW!"

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Hi,

I'll start off by saying that I know there was a thread recently about first, best and worst graphics cards, so if anyone deems this to be too similar then I'm happy for it to be closed/deleted.

This thread came about because I've been told I don't praise my AMD cards enough. It got me to thinking that the reason I don't feel the need to praise them publicly is that while I don't think they're bad cards, they've not really made me go "WOW!".
So I started thinking back to the last card that did.

I'm guessing this may depend on how often you change your card. If you've just upgraded from a GTX480 to a R9 290 (Pro) then the performance increase will probably be significant. Plus you'll probably be amazed at how cool and quiet the new card is
I tend to upgrade about once per generation, so I think the performance impact for me is less each time.

For me there has to be something special to make me go WOW!. When I spend £300 on a new card I'm expecting ~50% performance improvement, so that alone isn't going to make me go WOW!

The 3 cards that stand out for me are:

• 3Dfx Voodoo (1) card - Back when these came out it was really something different. It wasn't just a performance thing, it changed the look of the game too. I remember playing Quake and Quake 2 with OpenGL (I believe this was the time of the mini-OpenGL driver). As I recall I didn't overly like the graphics changes, they made everything look softer (if I recall correctly).
• 640MB 8800 GTX - I think I moved to this card from an Nvidia 6600Ti or something and there really did seem to be a performance jump. It was also a massive card. I believe at the time I was mostly playing City of Heroes, CoD4 and Crysis. Considering the fuss that had been made about Crysis I was impressed with how well it did (DX9 mode, didn't want Vista).
• AMD Radeon 5870 - Again the jump was from my 8800 GTX so the performance difference was huge and I got Win7 at the same time so got DirectX 11 and Tessellation!

Now I realise we all have different criteria as to what impresses us about a graphics card, but I was wondering what cards have impressed other people and why?

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

5870 at the time was a huge jump for me and a card that lasted years , well still is going just only in my media centre no gaming for it these days.
I will say it was loud at 100% fan

I killed my 5870 putting a waterblock on it
That's when I upgraded to GTX570 SLI. I'd have thought 5870 -> 570 SLI would've given me enough of a performance jump for a WOW, but that upgrade doesn't really stand out for me. Maybe the 5870 was handling everything I was doing well enough that despite the performance boost it didn't really get used. This was before I bothered with Benchmark (I think).

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Anyone remember the Kyro II? At the time it was a great card for the money for me. The top GPUs at any time have always been expensive. As already mentioned it's the jump from the previous generation that affects whether it feels like good value

Was that one of those cards that did something clever with the z-axis to improve rendering?
Something like most cards at the time rendered everything, if you could actually see it or if it was behind something, but the Kyro II calculated what could be seen on screen (using the z-axis) and only rendered those bits?