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Graphics cards that made you go "WOW!"

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 :)
 
Troezar said:
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 :)
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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?
 
Thanks Gripen. You just bought me back many memories of going through the Special Reserve catalogue wishing I was an adult with a job.
For me it was the Riva TNT2, it was 32bit colour and made Microsoft Combat Flight sim look great. Sadly it wouldn't work with OpenGL for quake 2 so I changed for a Voodoo 3 2000 and then I had glide but the combat flight sim didn't look so good.
 
gtx260 > gtx570 was a wow moment for me...then I got the 270 which is just a smaller improvement on the 570
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
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?
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Yes. And the graphic cards that all other vendors had out at the time couldn't compete performance wise due to using the traditional rendering everything approach. Nvidia did a presentation, which large part of it was PURELY dedicated to rubbishing Tiled-rendering that was developed and used by PowerVR :p

Part of me always wonder...what would the desktop graphic space be like today, had PowerVR remained in it...:(
 
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Just echoing many others really - Voodoo 1 was immense and then the 9700 Pro. Most releases since then have been a bit meh in comparison to those.
 
I couldn't afford a Voodo II do my first was a Voodoo 3 2000, prior to that I had no GPU in a 486 DX2 66, so a pretty massive leap.

Next amazing card was the 9500 Pro where I could unlock extra shaders, that blew me away for the cost.

And then the X1900XT PE, it was the first card I had that was flipping huge!!

Since then, everything else is just more FPS. I can't even see the difference these days between DirectX versions (in the same games).
 
All these talk about classic graphic cards, it got me thinking...it would be nice if there was a Quake modern remake with today's graphic and game engine...it would be totally awesome to play, and would probably be more FUN than these more of the same annual COD/BF releases...
 
Bossk128 said:
I couldn't afford a Voodo II do my first was a Voodoo 3 2000, prior to that I had no GPU in a 486 DX2 66, so a pretty massive leap.

Next amazing card was the 9500 Pro where I could unlock extra shaders, that blew me away for the cost.

And then the X1900XT PE, it was the first card I had that was flipping huge!!

Since then, everything else is just more FPS. I can't even see the difference these days between DirectX versions (in the same games).
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Don't think there was any "pe" cards with the x1900 series. Xt and xtx. There was an x800xtpe though.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Yes. And the graphic cards that all other vendors had out at the time couldn't compete performance wise due to using the traditional rendering everything approach. Nvidia did a presentation, which large part of it was PURELY dedicated to rubbishing Tiled-rendering that was developed and used by PowerVR :p

Part of me always wonder...what would the desktop graphic space be like today, had PowerVR remained in it...:(
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The Kyro II was a decent card that suffered from limited devrel resources (from an adept but tiny British-based PowerVR team) and being a bit behind on the feature-set curve, i.e. it was basically a DX6 card with software DX7 features released at a time when the competition was bringing DX 8.1 cards to market. The Kyro II punched way above it's weight though, outperforming much more expensive Geforce 2 GTS and Geforce 3's in games like Serious Sam at 1024x and above.

Series 4 (Kyro III) was apparently pretty close to going into production, but STMicro pulled out of the graphics market shortly before. If Series 5 (a 8x pipeline Shader Model 3.0 Tile-Based Deferred Renderer) had to come to market when initially planned and had enough devrel resources thrown at it, it should have technically blown the ATI/NV high-end competition at the time out of the water for a generation.

Unfortunately, given PowerVR's structure they were never really in a position to bring Series 5 to market on their own without a willing partner like STMicro. Instead, Series 5 formed the basis for PowerVR's dominant graphics IP licencing in the mobile sector for years to come through partners like Apple.

As for the question I'd have to go with the original Voodoo and Radeon 9700 Pro. Honourable mention to the beastly Voodoo 5 6000. :D
 
When I went from S3 integrated graphics to a dedicated ATi 9250 :P
Then again when I got my x1950 pro, then again with the 8800GT.
 
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