Munx wrote:

The FX 5200 is the worst card ever. I got scammed into getting it once when one of the big box stores was selling it with 256MB vram for cheap. The PCI version is literally on par with many of Intel's GMA graphics chips built into motherboards, it's that terrible. As long as you don't use it for gaming, it's OK I guess.

Actully funnily enough me and my friends played farcry back in 05 at lans, I had an FX5200 back then, and with all settings at medium, forced DX9B the FX5200 would not render the water correctly making it 100% transparent for me on any map, meaning i could accuratly shoot anyone swimming, was a big advantage on maps like surf 🤣[/quote]

Almost everyone I knew had an FX5200 in their setup. I was slightly less unlucky and had an FX5500. The bright side is that I feel better knowing that I wasn't the only one tricked into buying one thinking it was a powerful card because of the high video memory.[/quote]

Funny story my buddy convinced me to trade him video cards, he had the FX5200 first, and I had a Ti 4200. He convinced me that the FX 5200 was giving him problems with compatibility on his board because his board didn't support AGP 8x, and that the FX 5200 had DX9 and was way faster than my old Ti 4200. After that trade I determined to learn gaming hardware, before then I was more interested in just tweaking windows than games and gaming hardware. I never let that kind of thing happen again, but I was cursed from then on with FX 5200's 🤣

I have years ago FX5200 and FX5500 and that cards are very very slow, FX5200 is like GF4MX with shaders 2.0 and even not full 2.0 or like Radeon 9200/9250, when I changed to GF3Ti200 (that my card died) i see that card is way faster than FX5200 and I also have years ago GF4Ti4200 (my card also died) and is more than faster than FX5200, shaders is not a problem because FX5200 don`t have performance for any game which uses much DX9 instructions like Halo or NFS:Underground 2 😁 That card is good for games such as Quake3 or RTCW or UT99 or DX9 games on lowest details and resolution 😀

As i said in another post,it depends what card u had before the fx 5200,when i got my fx 5200 back in 2003 i had 3 years using a geforce 2 mx,i completly skipped geforce 3 and 4 and went directly to the fx 5200,becouse it was cheap.
Well compared to the old geforce 2 mx the fx was a clear improvement not only in games running faster,but also in image quality,games had more detailed textures,some effects that my old card couldn't do etc.
I think that was the last time,i saw a big graphical difference between 2 videocards,probably not as impressive as going from a 2d card to a voodoo 1 back in 1997,but still a big difference.

FX 5200 is a good example of a card that might SUPPORT certain features, but has no business actually doing them because it's so crippled. The problem though is many games detect if you can support those features and if you can, use them, and then the games framerate plummets as a result. I have a laptop with a GeForce Go 6100. Yes it's a part of the 6 series, but it also only has like 2 pixel shaders and 1 vertex shader. The problem is certain games, like even Final Fantasy 7 lag terribly on it at certain parts because the game detects that it can run certain GL_ instructions, which is technically true, but it can't run them very well. The result is a shitty experience because the chip supports things it shouldn't be running in the first place.

Then I run Final Fantasy 7 on a much older laptop and the game sees "Oh, this GPU doesn't support those instructions, we won't use those" and as a result the game runs 10x better on my old laptop compared to my newer laptop. Kinda silly.

That`s like run Arcania Gothic4 on my GF8600GTS when game run on high detail and is very slow, also NFS:Undercover did it on videocard running at first time at high details and on my friend GT250 game run at lowest details because can't recognise videocard, some games can`t do good hardware detect and slow down when enabling options that some videocards have that can't be used because videocard don't have enough performance for them. I have also that issue at Pentium 4 2.8 and Radeon 9250 when I run NFS:U2 when game run higher details and game is not playable. Because of that I like videocards with good perfomance like 4Ti and I don`t look at features and amount of ram which is confusing sometimes. In my opinion most important on videocard is kind of GPU and perfomance, not version of shaders or other things.

Radeon 9800 Pro. I had a ton of fun with that card back in the day, despite my awful Willamette CPU bottlenecking the heck out of it.

Matrox Millenium; the 1996 revision.

I remember at one point, during the height of all the nVidia model naming confusion, the Geforce3 was undervalued on eBay. People were paying the same or higher prices for Geforce4 MX cards and FX5200s. So many people didn't understand the relative performances that Geforce3 auctions were going cheaper than they should have.

It's pretty impossible for me to pick one card that I like the most. I can say though that I really enjoyed the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro on my previous PC, a late 32-bit Athlon machine. Games ran great, dual monitors worked perfectly, no stability or power management related problems whatsoever. I really liked that PC build, everything about that system worked perfectly together, GPU included. It was better than my current PC.
The 9800 Pro won me over to ATI. It was because of that card that when I upgraded my PC I tried another ATI based card. Too bad the modern card had annoying functional problems so I went back to NVidia.
I think the ATI 9800 Pro is one of the all time great video cards.

I also like the Ti4xxx cards, but I get disappointed by their lack of support with many games that want SM2.0.

S3 Trio 64.

It´s been realiable all these years and It just refuses to die.

I had a golden nv-Geforce 440mx for some years, it was quite good and was able to play to lineage 2 and late unreal engine games with it. The amount of punishment this card endured before dying was overwhelming.

1. ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
2. NVIDIA GeForce DDR
And i guess my current AMD Radeon HD 7970 that have served me for the last three years gonna end up in that list when it becomes retro.

*Voodoo 5500

Notable mentions:
*Matrox Mystique
*Radeon 9600 (sapphire ones in particular)

PS: the 4500s would be a great choice, however they're somehow extremely fragile and the mounting holes are uneven. I have about four dead ones and only one working one. You'd think the 5500s would be fragile, but nope. Every one has worked flawlessly for me.

Let's see... Voodoo 1 changed my whole perception of "what this computer thing" was all about and remains my #1 nostalgia video card though later iterations improved IQ and performance so dramatically it's difficult to accord the same status on a purely objective basis - the Voodoo 5 leads the Glide charge after all. Also, I would not be too disappointed were I stuck with only a Voodoo 3 - overall stability, IQ and compatibility leaves little to want with games of it's era.

Moving forward the 9700 Pro was a devoted workhorse for many years before the move to PCI-E. My favorite of the older pci-e cards is the EVGA 7900GTX...

Asus V7100 Geforce 2 MX, purely because it was my first proper 3D card and gave me that satisfying 'holy shit' feeling when I installed it.

Later on it was the 8800GT. Even at launch it was insanely cheap for the performance it brought, and that card still gives me unrealistic expectations of what each successive generation of mid-range cards should be capable of. Progress leaps have been disappointingly slow for the last 8 years 😀

BX300A wrote:

Asus V7100 Geforce 2 MX, purely because it was my first proper 3D card and gave me that satisfying 'holy shit' feeling when I installed it.

I agree - my first "real" (non- Virge) 3D accelerator was a Geforce2 MX also. It really blew me away.