History of the Modern Graphics Processor, read it all

The 9700 Pro.. Sure was a legendary card. It was Ailuros who talked me into returning the nvidia card that I bought at the time to get the 9700 Pro instead. That was good advice, lol. I think I might of went 6800Gt after as well, and definitely remember the 8800GT which I kinda felt like it was the closest to the next 9700 Pro. Well, my 2080 Ti OC be sitting here chuckling...lol.

I got the very first Radeon, it was called the Radeon 64mb DDR VIVO. It had RCA video input and output and was great for both gaming and home theater stuff. Later on I got the Radeon 8500 and then later a Radeon 9700 Pro. When 3dfx closed, I didn't feel like going with nvidia just yet, but now all my cards since 2005 have been Nvidia.

*edit* Come to think of it, it was actually the Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb I had.

I had no idea 3dfx was going to go out of business but I had been eyeing Nvidia since a friend of mine had the Riva TNT2 Ultra and he loved it. When the GeForce DDR came out people in the 3dfx camp all said that "Nvidiots are brainwashed by T&L propaganda and T&L isn't even a big deal and won't be for years"

Fair enough on the T&L point. I didn't care much about that. What I did care about was the crazy benchmark numbers:
images.anandtech.com/old/video/nvidia/geforce256_ddr/image004.gif

It just blew everything out of the water. I had also upgraded to a monitor that could display 1600x1200 and the GeForce DDR was the only card on the planet that could support it in games at something playable.

I also lucked out and I could overclock from 150 mhz to I think 170 with no issues. People said I was an idiot for doing that but in those days I only kept my GPU for like a year or two anyway so I wasn't worried.

Wasn't a single person in my immediate circle who had a Voodoo 5.

My first videocard was the 3dfx Voodoo Banshee sometime in the late 90's. I also got a Voodoo 5, unfortunately I accidentally broke the edge of the PCB on the master chip on it trying to re-seat the heatsinks on it. Later on I bought another Voodoo 5 at a fleamarket for $20, it works in single chip mode which means the slave chip on that one is bad. I've wanted to find someone who can maybe take the good master chip from one and put it on the other, or vice-versa with the slave chip. Looking back, I was just a kid and should have left well enough alone instead of trying to re-seat stuff. It broke my heart.

The first time I ever turned on hardware AA in games, I was blown away. Even 2x was incredible and usually still left the framerate acceptable. I was planning on getting the Voodoo 5 6000, but of course that one never made it to market. It was going to have its own external power supply.

I've only ever messed with the cooler on a GPU once. I paid $20 for this giant aluminum heatsink for my old 6800 GT. Dropped temps like 10c.

I also put liquid metal on my current laptop which dropped temps by like 20c, quite nice.

Ugh. Back in my college party days I had a friend who was a very stereotypical computer nerd. Then he got into meth. It really made him come out of his shell. He then decided he was "too cool" for computer games and sold all of his PC stuff. We lost touch. I heard he got busted for DUI and possession. No clue what happened too him after that.

Don't take meth kids.

Quite sad about your brother. Meth messes people up but its debatable if it causes schizophrenia or if accelerates and exacerbates symptoms. When I used to work in the mental health field one of my coworkers lost everything because he got into IV meth. He had scars all over his arms from it.

He had issues with depression after he got sober but no thankfully no paranoia or hallucinations.

Never saw the appeal of meth. When I was younger I was much more interested in things like mushrooms/peyote and the like, the whole pretentious "mind expansion" thing.

I'll say this, I know of someone who does/did meth and is schizo. I never got into drug use because I like to function with a clear and sharp mind 100% of the time and have seen how drug use has completely ruined peoples lives including killing themselves from overdoses. I think drugs effect different people differently because my one friend told me that heroin is basically cheap morphine and I remember when I chipped, fractured, and dislocated my shoulder the hospital gave me so much morphine to where I couldn't even fully lift my head to look at the clock on the wall but I still felt every bit of pain and I couldn't imagine paying to feel like you have uncontrollable falling asleep and minimal coherency. I didn't think it resembled anything of what I would call feeling good. They also gave me hyrdocodone to take home for the pain and again, it didn't take away the pain and holy shit constipation level 20 on the richter scale, batman! My shit was like solid concrete and I basically had to pick it out...thought I was going to need to go to the emergency room to get my shit removed, LOL. I flushed those pills down the toilet and can't believe people take them for pleasure? My only explanation is that they effect different people differently or it's the ultimate case of simple pleasures for simple minds. I'm not 100% a saint because as a teenager I smoked weed with friends and had a great time but after the teenage "fun" years I just flat out got burned out on it and just totally gave it up on a whim. I didn't feel addicted to it or anything. When I wanted to quit it wasn't hard at all and I didn't crave it afterwards. From time to time I'll get people trying to get me to toke up but like I said earlier, I like to function with a clear and sharp mind 100% of the time. I've also never been drunk in my life (that's another long story).