What, in your opinion is the most overrated graphics card ever produced? Not necessarily the worst card, or the most expensive, or even the most popular. Just one which was highly praised in the media and by word of mouth on forums such as these, but turned out to not really be all that much cop.
For me, it would probably be the Nvidia Geforce 2 MX. This card was lauded as the answer to our prayers - a mainstream part with kickass performance. It was frequently suggested as card of choice for gamers who didn't want to plash the cash on a high end GTS/Ultra part, and yet to be frank, it's performance isn't really all that hot.
I remember I paid £113 for the Hercules model back in 2000, which had 5.5ns memory allowing a higher memory clock. It was an upgrade from a voodoo3 and I was expecting to be blown away. But for example, my quake3 (admittedly with a low-end cfg) timedemo score only improved by 20%, despite having a decent cpu (P3-910E) and 140mhz cas2 memory.
Now, suprisingly I actually kept that card for around 20 months, which is the longest I've ever used a 3d card for since the Voodoo Graphics. But aside from 32bit colour it didn't offer a great deal over my overclocked V3.
It was crippled by SDR memory and I am currently using this card again in my second rig, overclocked to around 215/200. I tried playing Red Faction last night - a 5 year old game - and was reduced to running in 640x480, bilinear filtering, medium textures etc to get a decent framerate. This was with a 2.78ghz cpu and DDR406 ram, so the bottlenecking is purely down to the GPU. Heck, according to the game's system check thing my system memory bandwidth was around double my video memory bandwidth!
If we look back at the dawn of 3d accelerators, there were probably some other overrated cards such as the S3 Virge and early PowerVR parts. But for me the gf2mx was a huge disappointment given the hype surrounding it.
For me, it would probably be the Nvidia Geforce 2 MX. This card was lauded as the answer to our prayers - a mainstream part with kickass performance. It was frequently suggested as card of choice for gamers who didn't want to plash the cash on a high end GTS/Ultra part, and yet to be frank, it's performance isn't really all that hot.
I remember I paid £113 for the Hercules model back in 2000, which had 5.5ns memory allowing a higher memory clock. It was an upgrade from a voodoo3 and I was expecting to be blown away. But for example, my quake3 (admittedly with a low-end cfg) timedemo score only improved by 20%, despite having a decent cpu (P3-910E) and 140mhz cas2 memory.
Now, suprisingly I actually kept that card for around 20 months, which is the longest I've ever used a 3d card for since the Voodoo Graphics. But aside from 32bit colour it didn't offer a great deal over my overclocked V3.
It was crippled by SDR memory and I am currently using this card again in my second rig, overclocked to around 215/200. I tried playing Red Faction last night - a 5 year old game - and was reduced to running in 640x480, bilinear filtering, medium textures etc to get a decent framerate. This was with a 2.78ghz cpu and DDR406 ram, so the bottlenecking is purely down to the GPU. Heck, according to the game's system check thing my system memory bandwidth was around double my video memory bandwidth!
If we look back at the dawn of 3d accelerators, there were probably some other overrated cards such as the S3 Virge and early PowerVR parts. But for me the gf2mx was a huge disappointment given the hype surrounding it.
