Your GPU history?

[iameatingjam]

PPC CPUs never had integrated graphics, that would have required even more effort than their already antiquated designs. The G4 Minis had AGP ATi Radeon 9200 which was OK except for the paltry 32MB. At least my PCI Radeon 9200 had 128MB, which was decent for the time.

Ah yes it appears you are right. For some reason I thought I looked this up out of the blue the other week when I was curious. Must have looked at the wrong model or something.

Anyway are you also..... and 68k/ppc/os9 aficionado? I still keep a working Emac g4 700mhz on my desk. I like it because it dual boots os9 and panther while having a crt screen which is perfect for emulating old games. I have beige g3 in the closet somewhere. Cant remember its gpu either, but I remember I upgraded it from what it had stock. But there's nothing it can really do that my emac can't so its..... kinda fallen out favour

I used to have a working mac se with a 25mhz accelerator card. That thing ran like a rocket. I even filled it up with every game I could find on the internet ( and used the beige g3s floppy drive to transfer them to its hard drive), and put it on youtube. But eventually that account got hacked and google shut it down. It stayed on YT for a while but one day it was just gone and that video file is lost forever :'( along with the computer itself which died on its 30th birthday. It was my most favourite computer of all time!!!! Playing lemmings and that tetris game that liked to play tricks on you, and mocked you while you were playing. Then there was the adventure game Loom which I played all the way through, on camera!

There was a surprising amount of fun games available for that tiny black and white screen. And not the default ones you usually hear people bring up like dark castle and shuttlepuck cafe, both those games sucked imo. I found and videotapped all the ones I found fun. And I'm gonna cry that its all lost now.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Ah yes it appears you are right. For some reason I thought I looked this up out of the blue the other week when I was curious. Must have looked at the wrong model or something.

Anyway are you also..... and 68k/ppc/os9 aficionado? I still keep a working Emac g4 700mhz on my desk. I like it because it dual boots os9 and panther while having a crt screen which is perfect for emulating old games. I have beige g3 in the closet somewhere. Cant remember its gpu either, but I remember I upgraded it from what it had stock. But there's nothing it can really do that my emac can't so its..... kinda fallen out favour

I liked the eMacs as many ended up with pretty good CRTs in them and rarely died, just became yesterday's news with LCD screen fever.

Early beige G3s had a Rage II 2MB while later ones had the same Rage Pro 6MB that your iMac G3/333 had. All had an upgradable SGRAM slot and I still have a few 6GB modules in a bag here somewhere for those unlucky 2MB models. In that same bag are Rev C ROMs (socketed ROMS!) for the full upgrade but I can't remember what the Rev C's were good for... early OS X compatibility I think. The Beige G3s and 233-333 iMacs had similar componentry inside except for swapping out ADB for USB, very forward thinking except for the awful puck mouse.

I used to have a working mac se with a 25mhz accelerator card. That thing ran like a rocket. I even filled it up with every game I could find on the internet ( and used the beige g3s floppy drive to transfer them to its hard drive), and put it on youtube. But eventually that account got hacked and google shut it down. It stayed on YT for a while but one day it was just gone and that video file is lost forever :'( along with the computer itself which died on its 30th birthday. It was my most favourite computer of all time!!!! Playing lemmings and that tetris game that liked to play tricks on you, and mocked you while you were playing. Then there was the adventure game Loom which I played all the way through, on camera!

There was a surprising amount of fun games available available for that tiny black and white screen. And not the default ones you usually hear people bring up like dark castle and shuttlepuck cafe, both those games sucked imo. I found and videotapped all the ones I found fun. And I'm gonna cry that its all lost now.

I was mucking about with all the early Macs though I didn't own one for a while because of the expense. I have a collection about 20 early PowerBooks though not a coveted PB100. And I have not extracted and tested any in about 5 years, I should. For a short time I ran a PCI PPC upgrade website in the late '90s and upgrading those actually flexible Macs was fun. My favorite:

PowerMac 7500 - original specs
100 MHz PPC601 (G1) | 8MB RAM | 1MB MoBo Chips&Techs VRAM | 500 MB FastSCSI (10MB/s) HDD | 10bT | ADB periphs

Upgraded to:
1 GHz PPC7455 (G4) | 1GB RAM | PCI 128 MB Radeon 9200 | 4x 300GB ATA/100 HDDs | PCI 4x ATA/100 | PCI 3-in-1 USB2, GbEnet, FW400

All competing for and strangled by the original bus speed.

But that PCI Radeon 9200 was the first true 3D video card I owned, which is cool.

 

[iameatingjam]

The best thing about macs that run os9 native is connectix virtual gamestation. Thats why I chose the 700mhz emac. The newer emac only kinda have support for os9/may need some hacking to get it working.

Anyway that emulator is amazing. Its fast and compatible even on a 233mhz emac for crying out loud! I have played through so many classics on there Suikoden II, Lunar the Silver Star Story, Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Destiny, Crash Bandicoot. And there's still a few more I want to get to ( like final fantasy tactics, and threads of fate)

And sorry for getting off topic, it just still blows my mind what a good emulator cvgs is. That plus snes9x = thousands of hours of fun, on a machine I picked up at a thrift shop for $20. And... even the aspect ratio is correct.

I liked the eMacs as many ended up with pretty good CRTs in them and rarely died, just became yesterday's news with LCD screen fever.

Early beige G3s had a Rage II 2MB while later ones had the same Rage Pro 6MB that your iMac G3/333 had. All had an upgradable SGRAM slot and I still have a few 6GB modules in a bag here somewhere for those unlucky 2MB models. In that same bag are Rev C ROMs (socketed ROMS!) for the full upgrade but I can't remember what the Rev C's were good for... early OS X compatibility I think. The Beige G3s and 233-333 iMacs had similar componentry inside except for swapping out ADB for USB, very forward thinking except for the awful puck mouse.



I was mucking about with all the early Macs though I didn't own one for a while because of the expense. I have a collection about 20 early PowerBooks though not a coveted PB100. And I have not extracted and tested any in about 5 years, I should. For a short time I ran a PCI PPC upgrade website in the late '90s and upgrading those actually flexible Macs was fun. My favorite:

PowerMac 7500 - original specs
100 MHz PPC601 (G1) | 8MB RAM | 1MB MoBo Chips&Techs VRAM | 500 MB FastSCSI (10MB/s) HDD | 10bT | ADB periphs

Upgraded to:
1 GHz PPC7455 (G4) | 1GB RAM | PCI 128 MB Radeon 9200 | 4x 300GB ATA/100 HDDs | PCI 4x ATA/100 | PCI 3-in-1 USB2, GbEnet, FW400

All competing for and strangled by the original bus speed.

But that PCI Radeon 9200 was the first true 3D video card I owned, which is cool.

Okay I took it out of the closet and took some pictures

Doesn't even say what it is... but I think it might be another 9200. Knowing me I would have wanted the best it could take and according to this mac rumours post, this is it, without some hacking wizardry that is.

Question: How powerful of a graphics card will work in a beige Power Macintosh G3?

Original Question I have an old Power Macintosh G3 Minitower (266 Mhz) and I'm looking to install a GPU upgrade so the G3 can output higher resolution video at higher color depths. However, I don't know of any specs for what the max working graphics card specs (mainly VRAM) work for a beige G3...

forums.macrumors.com

EDIT: No, that can't be right. Says 9200 released 2003. This says 2002. What is it? Just a 9000? Actually judging by pictures that does seem more likely.

 

[Lew Zealand]

As it says Radeon on it, that rules out the near-ubiquitous PCI Rage128 that came in every Blue & While G3 and loads of early G4 towers. It could be an original Radeon (no number or qualifier), but it really looks like the Radeon 9000 as you surmise. The heatsink and VRAM chip placement match though I'm not familiar with a version having only a single VGA output. These were standard issue in later PowerMac G4s but those would have had the Apple-proprietry ADC connection on them at this time.

I am very jealous you have the Connectix GameStation, it was discontinued after Sony sued Connectix out of existence. But it's a fantastic piece of software and was well-coveted by the Mac emulator community. A PowerBook G3 WallStreet (1998) or especially Pismo (2000) with the GameStation was a portable Sony Playstation, a decade or more before powerful portable consoles existed.

 

[NSX05]

2006 -- NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420
Dell Dimension 4500 -- not mine, but the family computer when my step-dad moved in with us. It wasn't an enjoyable experience for the entirety that it was used. £2,000 for a 2.00 GHz Pentium 4 (Willamette), 128 MiB memory and an 80 GB HDD -- ouch. It's presumably still in the attic somewhere as it hasn't been thrown out.

2008 -- ATi Rage Mobility Radeon-D
Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook E-6624 -- my first laptop, and a much more snappy, enjoyable experience. The hard drive died a year later and my parents decided to buy me a new laptop for my birthday. In the meantime, I went back to the Dell. This laptop was eventually thrown out, but I made sure to save the Pentium III-M, memory and, most importantly, the HDD*.

2009 -- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
ASUS X58L -- one of my most sentimental belongings (the other being my original PS2). This machine went through all of my high-school, GCSE and further education years, all the way up to 2016 when I moved back to a desktop. It started out with a Celeron 575, 1 GiB DDR2 and 120 GB Hitachi HDD, and was upgraded several times over the years -- Core2 Duo T5900 and 2 GiB DDR2, then Core2 Duo T9300, 3 GiB DDR2 and a 500 GB WD Black. Still fully working and safely stored away.

2016 -- AMD Radeon HD 8570D
2018 -- AMD Radeon R7
2018 -- AMD Radeon RX 460
Prebuilt desktop -- this was a friend's computer, but he had moved on to Apple and let me buy it from him. I upgraded the A8-6600K to an A10-7890K and played GTA V comfortably on lowest settings with it. The processors and HDD have been retired, but the memory is still in use now by my younger brother's LGA1155 machine that I put together for him to experience PC gaming for the first time (pretty much just Minecraft and Fortnite that we play together). About 3 months after the processor upgrade, I managed to secure an RX 460.

2021 -- AMD Radeon RX 570
2023 -- AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
Custom built desktop -- in 2020, I jumped onto the AM4 platform (see system specs). This was the first time that the hardware inside my computer was fairly 'current'. Most of the build has changed, bar the case, motherboard and processor. I do plan on grabbing a 5800X3D at some point. About a year in, I upgraded the RX 460 to an RX 570, and grossly overpaid for it thanks to the cryptomining craze. Finally, last November, I bought an RX 6700 XT -- my first brand-new graphics card.

* Going back to this 'dead' hard drive, would anyone happen to be able to give a rough approximation as to how much data recovery would cost for it? It's a 20 GB Toshiba MK2016GAP (Ultra DMA 100 / Ultra-ATA). I ask because one of my best friends recently took his own life and our earliest memories together are on that drive. I would love to see them again.

 

[Sabbath]

I can't remember them all but I a few I do remember, Matrox Millennium, voodoo 3500, HD 4870, GTX 560ti, GTX 580, GTX 970, RTX 2080, RTX 4080.

 

[Princess Garnet]

Oh, wow, some of the posts a few back talking about early ATI video cards remind me of more humbling days where I didn't know anything. Wait... I still don't know anything! But I know "a little bit more of nothing" than I did back then, haha.

Anyway, before I was familiar with anything in the early-mid 2000s, the PC of my parents had some sort of Pentium 4 and an "ATI Rage 128 Pro". This became a learning experience for me.

Spoiler

So a short backstory, but the whole reason we had a PC was because I moved from my fathers' place back in with my mother and stepfather in the very, very early 2000s, and my father asked if I wanted the PC when I was moving out. It was an old Pentium, so it was around half a decade old, which was a lot back then. I sort of wanted it, sort of didn't want it, but he was going to get rid of it if not so I took it. My mother and step-father sort of didn't have a want or use for it either, so I was going to keep it in my room. We had no internet... yet.

But... that would soon change. My step father and older sister in particular decided to try those free AOL/Net Zero/whatever else trials/discs (remember those!?) and they started using it a lot, so the PC moved into the living area as a family PC since I was engrossed with the PlayStation/PlayStation 2 and other hobbies at the time. The problem was... this old Pentium with 16 MB or 32 MB and Windows 95 (?) was very slow on the internet and in general, so they bought a new Dell PC (Dimension 4300 I think?) with Windows 2000 in the summer of 2001 (just before Windows XP launched) to replace it, and I got the old one back but never used it.

A few years passed and I eventually started getting into PCs more and bought my own, a used, cheap one (Dimension 4100).

Closer to the mid 2000s, emulation, the internet, and PC games like Doom 3 was all starting to attract me towards the PC. The problem was... My Pentium 3 and GeForce "4" MX440 never stood a chance for the latter. The demo played pretty terribly when I tried.

I didn't understand much beyond the basics of hardware at that point, and I saw it recommended a Pentium 4 and a 128 MB graphics cards. "Their PC has a Pentium 4 and a 128 MB graphics card maybe?" I thought. I mean, it made sense because my GeForce 4 was including its 64 MB in its formal name, so I figured the number was a norm in naming and signified memory. You can see where this is going...

"Mom, dad, can I try this game on your PC?".

"Didn't you just buy one a few years ago?"

"Yes, but it's not as good and I just want to try this one game". (I was really into Silent Hill and Resident Evil around those years so horror theme stuff was calling to me, haha.)

"Okay."

I learned a hard lesson that, no, the Rage 128 was not capable for Doom 3 and didn't have 128 MB either (it had 16 MB?). It was even slower than what I had. And even the later GeForce 4 Ti upgrade didn't make it great either. It was a couple years later in the middle of the 2000s when I had a GeForce 6800 GS AGP (and on a Pentium 4 PC) that it finally made it well enough. Apparently Doom 3 and a lot of the shadow stuff liked the DirectX9 performance and other features of the GeForce 6 series.

That was right around the time my honeymoon phase in PCs solidified and I never looked back. I kept trying to learn what I could, and a few years later towards the end of the 2000s, I built my first PC. It's been a "ship of Theseus" ever since as I've never done a new full build after that first one, so arguably I have that "same" PC (obviously not as it's entirely different by now). I started losing interest in the higher end PC games and hardware in the 2010s but there's a bit of a new sparked interested in the last few years.

 

[dzdesigner]

Radeon 9200LE (around 2002)
Geforce FX5200
Geforce FX5500
Radeon HD4830
Radeon HD7850
Radeon R9 280x
Radeon RX580

 

[rodneyhchef]

Thought I'd already posted in this thread but seems not!

First PC (Socket 7 / PCI) 1998 - 2018
Cirrus Logic 5446 2MB (had some kind of basic D3D support, but only produced slide shows)
Voodoo 2 12MB - Immense!
S3 Virge DX 375 4MB - to upgrade the Cirrus card. Good 2D card at the time.
Also had (years later) a Savage3D PCI 8MB and finally a Geforce 2MX 32MB PCI as this became my retro gaming rig until I sold it circa 2018

Second PC (Super Socket 7 w/AGP) 1999 - 2001
Creative labs RIVA TNT 2 Vanta (M64) 16MB (Crap!)
Geforce 2 MX 200 32MB

Third PC (Athlon Tbird) (2001 - 2003)
Geforce 4 MX 440 64MB (great card!)
Geforce FX 5200 128MB (sh1t)

Fourth PC (Athlon XP) (2003 - 2007)
Geforce FX 5600 128MB (OK initially but failed due to bad HSF)
Radeon X800GT 256MB (I killed it trying to unlock more pipelines)
Radeon X1950GT 256MB. Great card! O/C'd like a champ. Pro would have been better though.

Fifth PC (Athlon 64) (2008)
Radeon HD3850 512MB
Radeon HD4850 512MB

Sixth PC (Intel Q6600) (2009 - 2011)
Radeon HD5850 1024MB
Radeon HD7870XT 2048MB

Seventh PC (i7 2600k) (2011 - 2021(!))
HD7870XT (carry over)
GTX 970
GTX 980 Ti

Eighth PC (3900x ->5800x3D)
GTX 980 Ti (carry over - could not get a new GPU during the crazy times)
RTX 4080

Actually a bit surprised I didn't have more on this list!

 

[esserpain]

My GPU history isn't nearly as interesting as some others', but I'll outline it real quick:

1. MSi Ventus GTX 1660 Ti (came used with the Dumpster PC™; acquired for free)
2. PNY Blower RTX 2060 (sold the 1660 Ti for this; purchased used off eBay; no hardware issues)
3. NVIDIA Founder's Edition RTX 3070 (2060 performance ended up barely being sufficient, so I got this and kept the 2060 as a backup; also purchased used off eBay; no hardware issues either, though it runs slightly warm [might be because of general system thermals, though])
4. NVIDIA Founder's Edition RTX 5070 (possible next upgrade, though that's still under consideration; if so, will be my first GPU purchased in new condition)

The above 3 have all been within this year. Yes, I'm a compulsive shopper.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Hmmm.....well, my first PC was a dell XPS m233s, and the dell nitro 1.3, some sort of s3 rebrand I think?

Dell Dimension 2400 (geforce 8400gs)- Wanted to upgrade the family PC to run empire at war, dad went to best buy and, for $300, got the best PCI video card they had.....a 8400gs. the 8 core, DDR2 VRAM model. This PC also had 768MB of mismatched DDR266 memory and a 2.4 GHz celeron disabled edition with a whopping 128kb L2 cache. That thing sucked ballz and frankly was e waste from day 1.

Dell Dimension 4600 (geforce 4 mx 440, 9800 pro, 2600xt)- After the divorce, as thanks for helping move things to the new house, I got new wife's old PC. Same case as my 2400, but WAY better machine. 2.2 GHz northwood with 512kb cache, AGP slot with geforce 4 mx 400. Shockingly that was an actual upgrade. Found a 9800 pro with a bad fan at the local recycler, jerry-rigged a new fan, what an upgrade! Ran that for a bit, then saved up enough to get a used 2600xt AGP edition. Ran that through middle and most of high school, into the early 2010s. Finally got an upgraded 3.4 GHz northwood in junior year along with the beefy copper heatsink.

Skunkwerks - Home PC (dual 550ti, dual 770, 480) - Finally senior year, got sick and tired of the ancient dino of a PC. Had a job, saved the cash, and built a new PC. Sandy bridge 3.0 ghz pentium, cheap arse mobo that I cant remember the brand, and a 550ti. Christmas that year, got another 550ti from a family friend as a present, splurged savings to get an asus P8Z77 v pro (hey remember when high end mobos were $200?) and ran in SLI. After graduation picked up a 3570k off ebay. Ran that for awhile, upgraded to dual GTX 770s in 2014. Around 2017 sold the 770s and got a RX 480 to play games that needed more than 2GB VRAM.

This PC still exists, currently in storage, not sure what im gonna do with it.

Skunkwerks 2 - With the 3570k showing its age and NVMe being a thing, I wanted an upgrade. Went with a 9700k during lockdown, along with dual vega 64s. What a catastrophic mistake that was. Those vegas were horribly unstable and lead to several years of annoyance. Worst part, sold the 480 so couldnt go back to it. Eventually, both cards literally burned their PCBs and would no longer function.

Now I'm left with a 9700k and mobo with no use.

Skunkwerks 3 - After several years of crashes, I ditched that entire machine and rebuilt. The new one featured a ryzen 5900x and a rx 6800xt, new case, new PSU, new everything. Aside from a 5800x3d slapped in, this is still my current build and with the price I had to pay, its gonna stay that way for a LONG time.

 

[igormp]

In chornological order from what I remember:

- Some random low end GeForce 6000 GPU
- GeForce 8400 (not sure which specific model)
- GeForce 9400 GT
- HP laptop that did that fancy hybrid crossfire thing (so CF between the A8-3500m's 6640g and the 6470M dGPU)
- R9 280x
- Another laptop, but with a GT 840m
- RX 480
- GTX 1050ti (started getting into ML, so had to move to Nvidia)
- GTX 2060 Super (cheapest GPU with 8GB VRAM and tensor cores at the time), sold during mining craze
- RTX 3060, same perf as the previous GPU, but with more vram, which was great
- RTX 3090
- Got another RTX 3090, so two of those now for that sweet 48GB of vram

 

[Sarajiel]

There have been so many GPUs in the past, but these are the notable ones...

- ET4000 VLB (on Am486DX2-80)
- Matrox Millennium (dual Pentium 133)
- Diamond FireGL 1000 (dual Pentium II 233)
- SSI graphics (SGI Octane)
- nVidia Riva TNT
- GeForce 256
- GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL (PowerMac G5)
- 2x GeForce 7800 GTX 512 (SLI on AMD FX-60)
- GeForce GTX 285
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- Radeon RX 6800XT
- GeForce RTX 4090

 

[LastEntertainment]

2000s
Potatoes from pre-built family PCs and laptop integrated graphics
2011-2014
GTX 560
2014-2020
GTX 980
2020-present
RTX 3080

 

[Paramount]

XFX 5200LE 128MB was huge update from the integrated GPU .
Albatron 7300GT 256MB
Palit 9600GT 512 MB
MSI reference GTX 470 768MB ( worse GPU in term of temperature ) i did a lot of Folding@home and dead after two year..
EVGA GTX670 2GB FTW ( i loved its aesthetic)
MSI GTX 1060 6GB TwinFrozer
EVGA 1070TI 8GB FTW ultra silent
Galax 2080 Super 8GB EX white ( was huge upgrade)
XFX 6900XT Merc 319 Black ( one of the best GPU bought in whole life )

and after two years with 6900XT , i ordered XFX 7900XTX Mag Air ( Phoenix Nirvana) to feed my 4K 144hz hope to love it too

 

[Krit]

7100GS
HD4670
GT240
GTX 470
GTX 670
GTX 770
GTX 780
GTX 980
GTX 970
GTX 1070
GTX 1080
GTX 1080Ti
RX 5700 XT
GTX 2070 Super
RX 6800
RTX 3080
RX 7900 XT
RX 7800 XT