• @[email protected]
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    121 year ago

    ATI 9800 pro held a special place in my heart. If I remember correctly it’s what I played half life 2 on.

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      IIRC that was the ideal GPU to play Half-life 2. My 9700m could not keep up. I was only 16 at the time, so I fell for the lies from the DELL salesman when I was buying my first gaming machine for that game. He told me that mobile GPUs are almost as good as desktop GPUs, and that the 9700m was almost as good as the 9800 desktop card. It was not.

      Barely got 30 FPS on medium, and I couldn’t run it at the laptop’s native resolution of 1900x1200. Had to settle for 1280x800 and the crappy upscaling of the time.

      I worked my ass off an entire summer for that stupid brick of a laptop (it was a first gen XPS, BTW), and it couldn’t even do 60 FPS in the latest games. I was betrayed so hard by that purchase that I learned how to build my own PCs so I’d never have to settle for an overpriced “gaming” laptop ever again.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Oh jeez. Fuck that salesman. :( That’s an awful thing to do to a kid. Money comes so hard at that age.

        I had a self build and a decent CRT at the time so scaling wasn’t an issue but I remember how horrible it was in those days on LCDs. It actually put me off moving from the CRT for a long time.

        I definitely overclocked that card and it was really good for that even on the stock cooler but I do vaguely remember it struggling with HL2. I can’t remember what CPU I had so that could have been the bottleneck.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Thank you for the memory! The first “retail” card I ever purchased (from a small town computer shop), literally just said AGP Graphics Adapter on the box… and inside was a delightfully generic SiS board, with which I had many fun hours.

      • h6a
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        61 year ago

        Damn, I hope you got a good payout. The logo is for a taiwanese foundry called Silicon Integrated Systems; they used to make very cheap chipsets and stuff like that.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      There was a 15 minute window where the 735 was the best Socket A chipset on the market.

      Unfortunately, they couldn’t get past cheapo ECS mainboards.

    • Snot Flickerman
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      61 year ago

      I had one of these, it was terrible, me and my friends called it The Cyst.

      • h6a
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        31 year ago

        My first “multimedia” computer back in '99 had an integrated SiS VGA card, with an amazing 8MB video RAM.

        Before that, my computer was a keyboard-only monochrome 386 with windows 3.1

        Yes, my back is killing me but my knees are surprisingly ok.

    • Rhaedas
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      21 year ago

      The good old days when you had just two choices and were either in the Riva TNT or the Voodoo club for a graphics card.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      Same … but interestingly for 3Dfxs fall I was still an invincible young lad, not knowing the meaning of chronic pain (or about that becoming the norm for a good day). Im still nostalgically sad about 3Dfx, and the later acquisition by nVidia … which then fucking used the SLI brand but made the acronym mean something else. It was not necessary.

  • TubeTalkerX
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    91 year ago

    My first Video card was Cirrus Logic. Spent $110 dollars to get 2 512KB memory chips to add to the card, but combined the 2MB video made Wing Commander III look great!

  • @[email protected]
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    121 year ago

    I remember the Voodoo brand cards, so not only do my back and knees hurt, but I should probably start getting my prostate checked.

  • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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    91 year ago

    I remember this brand fondly but, my back and knee pains aren’t from age but from getting side-swipped by an SUV on my motorcycle a few years ago. 30s isn’t old, it’s just adult, instead of young adult of the 20s.

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    Pfff. I had a Compaq laptop with a “blazing fast 12mbps” Express WiFi card. Everything hurts.