If you’ve been a PC gamer for more than a few years, it’s definitely worth your time to take a look at this long history of PC video cards. I jumped into the hardware game around the middle, when the Riva TNT was vying for dominance with the Voodoo2 and Rage 128.
If you have a technophobic spouse or work somewhere where people think “PCI express” is a kind of train, you probably should hide this article from view. Picture after picture of glorious old-school video cards, along with their specs and impact. It’s enough to send any sane person running for their lives. The rest of you, get your bookmarking hats on.
Back in the day, things were a lot different: no fewer than five or six companies were serious contenders in the video card game, as opposed to the two there are today. That must have been hell for game developers, although DirectX did serve as a handy rallying point. Anyhow, it’s a great little trip to make if you like being nostalgic about old computers (I hope I’m not can’t be the only one).
I remember owning some of those 3dfx cards. I remember having to buy one when we ordered 3d studio max off of ebay (which ended up being a really illegal rip and came with softimage too :P).
I want to dig out my old motherboards and frame some of them. And I’m also quite proud that I have an old ass win 95 setup still up and running using all of the original parts.
This is awesome! Thanks for the great find. Nostaligia is kicking in :)
I think my history goes something like…
Orchid Richeous 3DFX 4MB
Matrox G200
Geforce 256
Voodoo 3 2000
Geforce 3 Ti 200
Geforce 7600GT
HD4850
Mine would be the original IBM PC 25 row x 80 column monochrome card. I got a Hercules card a little later then bought a color monitor and a generic CGA card.
I still have my old Voodoo 2 12 Meg card. Man, that thing would scream at 800×600 resolution.
Trident 9440 was the beginning for me.
Solid State Music’s VDM1
16 lines
64 characters per line
1024 bytes of memory
All 7400 TTL SSI chips
2 Megahertz 8080 CPU
32 Kilobytes of 2102 Static Ram
S-100 Vector Graphics Chassis
Circa 1975