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The Evolution of AMD/ATI Radeon Graphics and Nvidia

Ruby or the Nvidia fairy (Dawn)? It’s a tough one :D

Some us are old enough to remember there was a hack to make Dawn appear without any clothes on. I never tried it. Honest .
 
Nice find - some of those old tech demos are great :D
Also realised I probably had a Geforce 256 as a kid, I didn't think I did but sure I've got that exact PCB knocking about in a box of old bits somewhere...
 
Paracelsus said:
Nice find - some of those old tech demos are great :D
Also realised I probably had a Geforce 256 as a kid, I didn't think I did but sure I've got that exact PCB knocking about in a box of old bits somewhere...
Click to expand...

That animated music one jogged my memory. I'd forgotten about it until I saw and heard it again. I must have have a 9700 Pro at some point. I've had enough cards over enough years to have forgotten most of them. Only a few stand out after the first (Voodoo), which was by far the biggest hardware upgrade I've ever seen. I remember having a TNT2 Ultra, which was very good at the time. I also remember having a Geforce FX5200, which was absolutely rubbish in every possible way. Which reminds me that at one point I had an S3 ViRGE, the GPU so bad it was derisively dubbed a "3D decelerator" when GPUs were called "3D accelerators". I had a Geforce 7900GT at some point. I only remember because I pulled it out of my collection of old bits recently to joke that I had a 7900. I remember having a Radeon HD 7950, mostly because it introduced me to undervolting. I gained 20% performance from undervolting because the card I had was very heavily power throttled at stock.

mickyflinn said:
32mb of SDR always make me smile by today's standard.
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My first serious graphics card had 4MB. Orchid Righteous 3D, using the Voodoo GPU. Which wasn't called a GPU as that name came later. It was amazing. 4MB was a lot in those days.
 
I remember having a PC with 1mb of RAM! Memory of all kinds is crazy these days. I was looking at my M2 drive yesterday thinking how much hard storage has changed to.
 
gjbf1 said:
I remember having a PC with 1mb of RAM! Memory of all kinds is crazy these days. I was looking at my M2 drive yesterday thinking how much hard storage has changed to.
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My first PC had 1MB of RAM too. And very high spec storage. Dual 5.25" floppy drives and a 20MB HDD. Or maybe it was 40MB. One of the two. The drive was about the size of two house bricks. About the same weight, too.

Not the same model, but this page has some pictures of a drive of the same type, which shows size. https://www.retropcstore.com/produc...rd-disk-drive-introduced-in-late-1981-year-3/
 
Angilion said:
My first PC had 1MB of RAM too. And very high spec storage. Dual 5.25" floppy drives and a 20MB HDD. Or maybe it was 40MB. One of the two. The drive was about the size of two house bricks. About the same weight, too.

Not the same model, but this page has some pictures of a drive of the same type, which shows size. https://www.retropcstore.com/produc...rd-disk-drive-introduced-in-late-1981-year-3/
Click to expand...

Yep those good olde days. I think my first HDD was 400mb and shook the house when it spun. You could hear it outside! No off board GPU, no sound, no CD, just a proper floppy drive with flaccid disks. And a stunning 13" CRT monitor which somehow managed to be grey, green and yellow all at the same time.
 
Angilion said:
That animated music one jogged my memory. I'd forgotten about it until I saw and heard it again. I must have have a 9700 Pro at some point. I've had enough cards over enough years to have forgotten most of them. Only a few stand out after the first (Voodoo), which was by far the biggest hardware upgrade I've ever seen.
Click to expand...

I remember the hype over the Voodoos. The first major standout for me was the 9600XT - came with HL2 so introduced Steam, and I remember being awed by the Lost Coast HDR demo. Cheap card too.
For older cards, I managed to piece together the history, except for one card, some sort of Matrox one - maybe a Millenium - that my older brother put in our PC. Neither of us knew what we doing so in hindsight, I'm certain it was physically installed but with no drivers - with Win95 and no internet it would have needed doing manually - so just sat there unused :cry:
 
humbug said:
Interesting to observe Nvidia's mind share through things like this, he thinks Nvidia invented Tessellation and Hair Physics.
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If you went back and looked at the features introduced throughout the years, AMD by far have been the bigger innovators and the ones to push newer tech, nvidia have always been the brutes, the ones who throw shed loads of power at you, if only to 1up the competition, it's only recently they have been able to hold the performance and efficiency crown at the same time, but how long will that last?
 
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