Influential cards throughout history (Good & Bad)

[HammerON]

I will have to go with the Radeon 9700 Pro...
First GPU I ever purchased was a 9600XT. I really wanted a 9800XT, but could not afford it

 

[WarhammerTX]

I also think that 3dfx's Voodoo pushed the 3D hardware accelerated graphics market (mainly for gaming though) on consumer level with the Voodoo 1 and 2 with the Glide api which was way faster than D3D of its time. Actually I liked the idea of such upgrade/expansion card rather than buying a whole new videocard. I still remember the Diamond Monster 3D brand, that was awesome! Also, 3dfx came up with the concept SLI with Voodoo 2, though ATI came up with a similar thing with their ATI Rage MAXX with a dual graphics chips design.

On the other hand I think Nvidia made a huge mistake by releasing the NV1. I still have it somewhere and it's called the STG-2000, it's all-in-one card, it's a videocard (upgradeable videoram) with built-in soundcard and support several Sega games with Sega Saturn gamepad ports support; the only games that were specially/natively supported are Virtua Fighter Remix, Panza Dragoon and Virtua Cop (this last one was not included in the bundle, I had bought it separately while the native NV1 support was still intact besides the D3D support for Windows 95, if I remember it correctly). The NV1 failed because it only supported quad surfaces, but also because of Microsoft's D3D supported and still supports triangle surfaces, while the product was tied to a failing game console in terms of sales, that's called the Sega Saturn which nonetheless had great games in its library such as Virtua Fighter 2, Panza Dragoon Saga, Sega Fighting Megamix. I heard Nvidia almost died because of this adventure with the NV1, but don't know it's true.

I agree and then ati released the 8500 that made them a contender in the video card market

 

[Graogrim]

Positive:
3dfx Voodoo -- The true pioneer that brought hardware 3D into the mainstream.
GeForce 256 -- Brought hardware transform and lighting to consumers.
GeForce 3 -- Shaders were a game-changer.
GeForce 4 Ti 4200 -- It was probably the best bang for the buck for its time ever.

Negative:
The entire GeForce 5 (FX) generation -- an object lesson in how NOT to iterate.

Mixed:
Intel's i720 -- Served as a proof of concept for AGP functionality and shared memory architecture, but also hammered home the need for dedicated texture memory on cards intended for real performance.

 

[razaron]

Voodoo 5 6000.