The editors become graphics card nostalgic and dream back to times gone by

Before the article about a historical look back at the graphics card market, technology oracle Andreas Eklöv came across a patrol – a character from a Japanese role-playing game had stolen his photo album with pictures of old graphics cards. Or he did not have an album from the beginning. In any case, he turned to SweClocker’s enthusiasts for help collecting illustrations for the next big work.

► Do you have pictures of old GPU classics?

When the members dug into the hiding places of the past, the response became enormous and the thread was quickly filled with both antiques from the flagship of the last decade as well as those that are still fresh in the memory. This made the nostalgia flow to the editors, who are inspired by the pictures and share anecdotes from the past.

Jacob Hugosson – My first scratch build

I registered at SweClockers in connection with building my first computer from scratch. Do you recognize yourself? At the end of 2007, I was admittedly a gaming nerd of rank and already loved technology, but was not familiar with the details. What I did know, however, was that my computer with the Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti 4200 was tired.

The timing of my registration could not have been better. Only eleven days later, Nvidia’s Geforce 8800 GT was released, which offered similar performance as the 8800 GTS but at a much lower price. I learned that it was a graphics card many were waiting for as it was expected to offer a lot of performance for the money. A few weeks later, AMD countered with the Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850.

After this, I started as a newly hatched 18-year-old who went the last year of high school and worked extra save together for my first scratch construction. A combination of tight budget and then newfound fanboyism (read: nonsense) ended up in a build that revolved around an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ “Brisbane”, which I managed to screw up from 2,100 to just over 3,000 MHz stable, and a Radeon HD 3870.

The choice of graphics card was not easy despite recent brand preferences as the Radeon HD 3870 and Geforce 8800 GT offered similar “performance per krona”, where the latter cost a few hundred bucks extra and thus also performed better. It is also Nvidia’s ditto that has made the biggest impression on me. Even today, I can think of myself as thinking back to what it did with the graphics card market in the performance segment.

The graphics card fall of 2007 and in particular the Geforce 8800 GT is without a doubt one of the events that aroused my inner glow, which later developed into an obsession and by extension a life, which revolves around hardware.

Emil Åkered – Matrox in the first home computer

Around the turn of the millennium, the so-called “Home PC reform” rolled. In short, it was about the possibility of renting a complete computer package with accessories against gross salary deductions. The systems were developed by a number of different players, and were then sold via employers in various different configurations.

For us, it meant one of the first “real” computers into the home. As usual at that time, the machine was placed in a central room, where the whole family could enjoy the glory. The exact specifications are lost in the mists of time, but one thing I remember – Matrox Mystique. Even there, however, it is a bit messy, where I can not 100 percent put my finger on whether it was Millennium or Mystique that mattered.

Either way, the card was quite frankly pretty rotten even then, with faster models from both AMD and Nvidia around the corner or already launched. I remember moments with special drivers from dubious sources that would squeeze the last of the circuit, and push up the frame rate in the then fresh Counter-Strike.

A fun side effect I clearly remember is also the half-good support for Direct3D which made some walls and objects invisible, in practice built-in wallhack. It is doubtful if there was any advantage, however, as the possible cheating was effectively counteracted by a frame rate south of 20 FPS.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridges, and the reform around Hem-PC has long been history. However, Matrox Millennium will forever represent the first time I had my “own” computer with a real graphics card. Therefore, it deserves an eternal place in my mental history book.

Jonas Thörnqvist – Geforce enters the stage

Just before the turn of the millennium, I started to get tired of my aging 3dfx Voodoo 2 card and therefore looked for sensible upgrade paths. The sight was initially set on Nvidia’s Riva TNT2, but after advice from a more computer-savvy friend, I chose to wait with the new purchase, as more exciting donations were waiting around the corner.

What my friend was talking about was Nvidia’s Geforce 256, the company’s first card in the Geforce family. The card’s graphics processor NV10 excelled with hardware-based support for transform and lighting (T&L) – a technology that was otherwise run relatively slowly in software mode on the processors of that time.

Another thing that distinguished the Geforce 256 was the fact that it was offered in a variant with DDR-based graphics memory, which gave the card an impressive doubling in memory bandwidth compared to the model with SDR memory.

In the end, I chose to shell out the extra money to get the DDR version of the card, something that was successful in retrospect as the SDR ditto of Geforce 256 was often limited in performance by its low memory bandwidth in high-resolution 32-bit color scenarios.

► Andreas Eklöv and Thomas Ytterberg.