Evolution of the gaming graphic card

It my time I have tried to remain on the curve for gaming graphics cards; currently own a 6950 as an example. The gaming graphics card has evolved quite rapidly over the past few years with ever growing pipelines etc to get more and more polygons and pixels on the screen.

But lets take a step back through my list of historic graphic cards to see the general progression. So, going back many years, back in 1994 I bought a 1mb Trident graphics card. It could do 1024x768 and up to 16 million colours (most were like 64k). Now this may not sound a lot but back in the day this was equivalent to one of the top end graphics cards of today. You could play any game with all colours and backed up with a soundblaster 2 mono soundcard it was the business.

As time progressed in mid 1996 I bought a Matrox Millenium (I got on trade price at time). Now this was the more powerful card as most game systems were running the Matrox Mystique. This was like having the most expensive top graphics card today and again ran games like MechWarrior 2 and Destruction Derby 2 at an amazing rate. But better was to come as VooDoo were releasing their first addon cards giving us 3DFX.

So, what was your first 3DFX card? Well for me it wasn't hehe. My first was the competitor which was a PowerVR Card. This was an excellent addon card that gave excellent graphics (in my opinion superior to 3DFX) but did not close as many deals as their rivals and so went into just producing chips for cards.

I then in late 97 or was it early 98 went for a 3DFX Banshee card which was graphic card with 3DFX built in. I remember it well as had Half Life day 1 demo with it that kept me drooling for some time. 3dFX Voodoo2 addon came after that. Then the blur of GeForce cards.. 1, 2, 3, 4 and so forth.Not long after I got my first ATI which was a 9600 Pro. That made me want more (after changing fan and pushing it) so next was 9800 Pro.  After killing that (changing fan) I got a 9800XT

Next from that  went to nVidia again and got a GTX260 XXX. Absolutely loved that card. Only sold it cause wanted DX11. So got a 5770 XXX followed by a 5850. And now were up to 6950. There maybe one or two cards I missed through that journey, I don't think there is but there maybe. But in my purchases there is the evolution of PC graphics card and a beautiful growth it has been.