I believe I had the Riva tnt2. After that upgrading to the original GeForce 256. Was on my Intel Celeron 300A that you could overclock to a whopping 450mhz!
I had an ATI all in wonder 9600. That card was very unique because it also had a built in TV tuner and AV capture card that could turn your PC into a DVR of sorts. It went into an agp slot before PCIe was a thing.
I forgot the first one, but I remember I upgraded it to an ATi Rage Pro so I could play Baldur's Gate, which needed 8 megabytes of video ram. Later I paired it with a Voodoo 2. I think it was the Diamond Monster one. And that one got replaced with a Matrox G200, which got replaced with Kyro II. I picked some odd cards back then.
I got a 3DFX voodoo as soon as they came out. GL quake was mind-blowing.
I bought a Riva TNT
Then a GeForce 2
Then a Radeon 9000
Then for a bunch of years I just moved into laptop after laptop with discrete GPUs.
Now I still have a 1080 and a 2070 doing a little bit of light AI work and video transcoding for me. But I'm still relying on crappy laptop GPUs for all my gaming. They're good enough.
It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn't even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.
I don't know what hardware my first computer had because I didn't even know what a GPU was at the time... But the first GPU I ever bought was the 8600 GT.
evga GTX 770 It never died
Replaced it with an evga GTX1080 it blew up 2 months out of warranty.
they sent me rtx 2070 despite the warranty(MISS YOU EVGA). I gave that card to my wife and upgraded to a 3080 from aorus.
the card is great, but the software that comes with the card is beyond awful. I will probably get an Asus next time.
I remember when the EGAs came about. Damn, it was like stepping into the future. But I didn't have a color monitor so it didn't matter. I was probably more envious than your friend.
I attempted to upgrade such a card and were suggested the Geforce FX 5200.
I was so hyped. After finally installing the games I always wanted to play I ad to realize: This passive cooled card supported DX9 on paper but its performance was worse.
It crushed me back then and since then I have never bought a desktop PC part ever again.
But then recently I was gifted an old rig from a friend. Put a Readon RX 6700 (or so) in it.
So my first actual graphics card is this radeon!! :)
Buddy, if you read this: Thank you again, much love. You are an awesome beeing.
I was about to get one of those used (only difference is it being the 8GB version) but at the end it turned out it didn't work so I bought a new RX 6600 instead
The first one I got was some integrated cirrus logics chip that didn't even have 3d acceleration. The first one I bought with my own money was a GeForce 7800GT in late 2005
If by graphics card you mean 3D hardware acceleration, then it was a Canopus Pure 3D. It was equivalent to the first Voodoo add-in card but IIRC it had 6 MB of RAM instead of 4. It wasn't a standalone card so it had a VGA passthrough from your 2D card when it wasn't active.
As for 2D cards, idk. Unless it was pro reference grade like Matrox I don't remember EGA and CGA cards being branded.
My prime gaming years were self moderated by only going to internet cafés as a strict rule to manage my time. I spent a lot of time at cafés, but nowhere near as much as I would have played if I had my own hardware. It wasn't the money. It was about the time management and a large part of how I owned my first auto body shop business.
Nvidia Riva 128 AGP with 4 megs of ram. I will never ever forget when they released hardware accelerated opengl drivers and I played Quake GL for the first time. It was hitting 120fps and looked absolutely beautiful compared to the software rendered games I'd played up to that point.
I remember because it was my first PC that I got for myself. I was an intern at a small computer repair shop and that's where I learned how to build computers.
Before that I only played on my parents PC and afterwards I switched to Mac.
Technically, an ATI Radeon 9800 as that was my first custom built computer in 2003. However, the ATI Rage IIc was the gpu inside my first desktop computer, an iMac G3 in 1998. But the first one I used was the VGC 12-bpp palette graphics of the Apple IIgs, where I was first introduced to computer games and upgrading the accelerator cards and memory to play new games with more demanding requirements in 1994.
Dont remember the details anymore, but I remember something called "Voodoo".
Also, connecting 2 different types of graphics cards with a cable on the outside for some reason.
an ancient card with a colorful box from 3dfx.
I think it was a voodoo 2, but not one that came bundled with creative soundblaster.
Yes, we needed another physical card for sound.
It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.
A Monster 2 8 MB. I remember being angry at my parents that they didn't get me the 12 MB version. But I couldn't formulate my anger because I didn't understand the difference between system and GPU RAM.
Still, I was amazed how quickly weapon switching now was in Jedi Knight. And Unreal always looked thr best in Glide. And the included rotating donut demo with bump mapping was awesome! A feature that would go on to be touted as the revolutionary hot new shit even 20 years later.
ATI Rage something on AGP bus, no 3D acceleration, certainly no Openssl etc, but it had hardware MPEG2 decoding, you know, for DVD
My parents later bought me GeForce 2 MX400, in 2007 i bought a new PC with my own money (first salary) with GeForce 7300GT, later upgraded it to 9600GT, then Radeon HD 7770, GTX 1050 and now RX 6600, it's a Theseus's PC at this point
Upgraded my highschool family desktop I took to college with a GeForce 8800 GT , used until I build a new pc with a Radeon 7970 GHz edition, which was replaced with a rx580 after the card passed away from light coin poisoning. Desktop is now running unRAID and my new main rig has a gtx 3070 in.
First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.
I had an s3 virge card. Amazingly bad, it basically was no faster than cpu rendering, but looked a bit better. I spent so much time trying to trick games into running on it.
Mine was an ELSA Erazor III LT (the name somehow stuck). It was an offer that was bundled with horribly bad and clumly mechanical shutter 3D goggles. I remember trying Half Life with it. It was rattling all the time and the 3D effect was mediocre.
It was for my first "own" pc in 2001. I didn't have one specific game in mind when buying it, but the first thing I played with it was Giants: Citizen Kabuto.
It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.
The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that's just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.
Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.
My single-slot Radeon HD 6770 from PowerColor was quite nice, although outrageously loud toward the end of its lifespan. Bit of a dead end from the start though (last of TeraScale, never got Vulkan), but I still had a blast with it.