@davillain said:

@Xtasy26: I wasn't there when the GeForce 256 came out as I was still a console brat at the time. My first Nvidia (never had an AMD GPU) was the EVGA GeForce 8800 GT which came with Crysis at the time as Crysis itself was the game I wanted to play and its the reason why I got into PC gaming in the first place. Also with Intel Core 2 Duo E6600.

As of right now, I'm using the latest Nvidia RTX 4070 and so far, it's holding well for a semi high-end GPU IMO:

Also, I'm undecided if I'll get the RTX 5080 whenever that comes out. I swear, if Nvidia gimps the 5080 with only using 16GB VRAM, I ain't buying it!

8800 GT was a common GPU that a lot of people got back in 2007 in hopes of playing Crysis. It had a good prices in the $200 - $250 price range. Too bad nVidia doesn't entertain those price ranges anymore especially with the mid-range.

TNT was actually better in many ways to the Voodoo 2 back in 1998. It had support for 32-bit color whereas the Voodoo 2 only supported 16-bit. Games looked way vibrant with 32 bit color. Only thing that 3DFX had going for itself was that it was the performance king with Voodoo 2 SLI with nVidia and neither ATI could touch at that time.

On this day, the original GeForce 256 DDR (or with SDRAM depending on which one you prefer) was released. It brought about huge performance increase that crushed the Voodoo 3 and and the ATI Rage 128 Pro and the many other 3D contenders. Brought forth Hardware T&L instead of doing it in software which made games look significantly better. Even though I have AMD Radeon avatar have switched to nVidia since 2017 with GTX 1060 6GB. So, it's been 7 years on nVidia since switching from AMD/ATI. My first experience with nVidia was the RIVA 128, playing games like Turok, Forsaken, Quake 2 (although couldn't get it to run in hardware acceleration mode for some reason) as well the OG Hot Pursuit. Although this was on my Dad's work computer which was a Pentium 2 PC so I wouldn't call it my first nVIDIA GPU. My first nVIDIA GPU would have to be the GeForce 4 64 MB DDR (yes DDR!). It was an eye opening experiencing, finally could play all the latest games on my Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz (Northwood Core) which was a descent Gaming PC. Although it was the MX variant so couldn't play games with the Pixel Shader 2.0. But it was good enough to play all the games that came out in 2002 which was when I got my first GeForce GPU.

Don't have the pic of GeForce 4 probably in some box somewhere. But here is a pic of my last nVIDIA GPU the RTX 3090, which is a beast! Finally made the jump to 4K with it allowing me to play everything maxed out with Ray Tracing.

So, what was your first nVidia GPU and what are you currently rocking now?

Old school. Don't give a damn about most of the new so-called shooters like Fortnite. Liked Quake 2, original Unreal, a bit Bioshock, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, No One Lives Forever 1 & 2, MOHAA, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the earlier CoD games, up to CoD 4. From what I hear the rest of CoD are trash except for maybe a few. Finished all the ones stated except Bioshock. Recently would like to try the Halo Series. Played it bit back when it came out on the PC in 2003 but never finished. Getting mixed response from Halo fans with respect should play the Original Halos in it's original style or play it in the re-master. Maybe somebody can chime in.

ID nailed it in this regard. Probably the best soundtrack from an ID game.

Yeah. We had already two new Doom games. I think there's something to be said going back to the Quake universe. But something tells me ID thinks another Doom game will sell well hence the lack of interest in another Quake game. Do note that the last Quake game Quake 4 was developed by Raven Software. While all the Doom games were developed by ID. I think ID considers Doom their baby and wants to continue.

6800 XT is a great choice! Great bang for the buck in the mid-end.

2007 belongs in S tier. Otherwise mostly agree for S tier especially with 1998 and 2004 with the latter being the greatest over the past 25 years.

Agree Robocop was a surprise. I was also surprised for Cyberpunk and it's expansion. CD Projekt Red righted a wrong. Was surprised they added a 3rd ending. I was somewhat disappointed with ending of CP.

No. We want competition and better prices. Why is wanting competition for consumers on both the mid-end and high-end a bad thing and see what AMD needs to improve?

That's good to hear that intel is doing good in Ray Tracing. I thought it was a smart move to use the method intel uses with XeSS. They basically hired the guy who developed DLSS for XeSS. That was a smart move. No wonder it's beating FSR in the image quality department. It's going to a tough hill to climb with all the driver optimizations needed especially with older games. Apparently they increased the performance of Assassins Creed Unity by like 100% but that was a game like from 10 years ago. Goes to show how much they have to do with going back to games from over 10 - 12+ years go. I was really looking towards A770 when it released because it was the first time in 20+ years ago that I felt we would have a viable competitor after 3DFX's demise.

Looking forward to what intel has for Battlemage. My suggestion is to have one-die like AMD had for example when they launched the HD 4800 series initially with HD 4850/4870. Release one die and heavily focus on optimizations and double down on the drivers. Do, that for Celestial and then go for the high end with Druid. This will help intel focus on one chip at a time instead of multiple chips.

Can't believe I am rooting for intel. :P

Sending engineers to AAA developers is something that has been bothering me from AMD of their reluctance to do so and this goes back 15 - 20 years ago. It's like nVIDIA really cares about their customers and are bending over backwards to make sure games runs the best on their hardware. I was surprised to find 3-4 Nvidia guys in the credits to No One Lives Forever 2 vs 1 guy from ATI when I finished NOLF 2. That was 20 years ago! This means Nvidia is providing whatever resources to developers to make sure AAA games work the best on their GPUs. I even read about NVIDIA sending engineers to help Crytek to make the Crysis looks the best. That's what I call commitment! I don't think pricing is necessarily bad but working with AAA developers from the beginning instead of trying to fix it later with driver updates is another example where NVIDIA is one step ahead of AMD.