My Travels Through Video Card History

So I picked up a few old PC components - mostly Socket A era circa 2001 - and whilst I battle with various buggy motherboards from the era (probably due to bad capacitors which plauged everything at that time it seems), I’ve been thinking about the various video cards I’ve had over the years.

Mostly were for games, although there were other applications too (and long before ML with a GPU was a thing).

Our first computer had some sort of Western Digital video chip - it was a 486-based system and at the time I had to mail order a driver disk to get 256 colours in Windows 3.11. Why the original PC wasn’t shipped with this I will never know - it was a pre-built system with everything installed (even Doublespace, yuck) and the video card was built into the motherboard. So there certainly wasn’t much chance of having something else running there.

• S3 Trio 3D
• (some time passes - I’m not sure what was the first video card in the first PC I built)
• ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, based on the ATI 3D Rage Pro
• TNT2 Ultra
• GeForce4 Ti4200
• GeForce 6600 GT
• GeForce 8800 GTX
• GeForce GTX 1070 (current PC)

Comments (0)