Probably back in 1999 when I finally upgraded my Pentium 133/S3 Trio64V+ system to a Celeron 333/Trident Blade 3D rig. I could barely wait for the new PC to arrive.
That poor Cely was immediately overclocked to 400-something MHz, while the lowly Trident Blade was forced to run Quake 2 and Tomb Raider 2 in all of their 3D accelerated glory. It was the very first 3D graphics card that I ever owned, so I was super excited, not even noticing the craptastic performance at first. The visual difference between software rendering and OpenGL/Direct3D seemed incredible to kid me. I don't think I was ever quite as hyped for a piece of hardware after that.