It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn't even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.
I don't know what hardware my first computer had because I didn't even know what a GPU was at the time... But the first GPU I ever bought was the 8600 GT.
I forgot the first one, but I remember I upgraded it to an ATi Rage Pro so I could play Baldur's Gate, which needed 8 megabytes of video ram. Later I paired it with a Voodoo 2. I think it was the Diamond Monster one. And that one got replaced with a Matrox G200, which got replaced with Kyro II. I picked some odd cards back then.
I got a 3DFX voodoo as soon as they came out. GL quake was mind-blowing.
I bought a Riva TNT
Then a GeForce 2
Then a Radeon 9000
Then for a bunch of years I just moved into laptop after laptop with discrete GPUs.
Now I still have a 1080 and a 2070 doing a little bit of light AI work and video transcoding for me. But I'm still relying on crappy laptop GPUs for all my gaming. They're good enough.
If by graphics card you mean 3D hardware acceleration, then it was a Canopus Pure 3D. It was equivalent to the first Voodoo add-in card but IIRC it had 6 MB of RAM instead of 4. It wasn't a standalone card so it had a VGA passthrough from your 2D card when it wasn't active.
As for 2D cards, idk. Unless it was pro reference grade like Matrox I don't remember EGA and CGA cards being branded.
I got a graphics card that somehow bricked hard drives. We went through a lot of hard drives before finding out this was the case. I don't remember specifics
It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.
My prime gaming years were self moderated by only going to internet cafés as a strict rule to manage my time. I spent a lot of time at cafés, but nowhere near as much as I would have played if I had my own hardware. It wasn't the money. It was about the time management and a large part of how I owned my first auto body shop business.
an ancient card with a colorful box from 3dfx.
I think it was a voodoo 2, but not one that came bundled with creative soundblaster.
Yes, we needed another physical card for sound.
Nvidia Riva 128 AGP with 4 megs of ram. I will never ever forget when they released hardware accelerated opengl drivers and I played Quake GL for the first time. It was hitting 120fps and looked absolutely beautiful compared to the software rendered games I'd played up to that point.
Dont remember the details anymore, but I remember something called "Voodoo".
Also, connecting 2 different types of graphics cards with a cable on the outside for some reason.
I remember because it was my first PC that I got for myself. I was an intern at a small computer repair shop and that's where I learned how to build computers.
Before that I only played on my parents PC and afterwards I switched to Mac.
Technically, an ATI Radeon 9800 as that was my first custom built computer in 2003. However, the ATI Rage IIc was the gpu inside my first desktop computer, an iMac G3 in 1998. But the first one I used was the VGC 12-bpp palette graphics of the Apple IIgs, where I was first introduced to computer games and upgrading the accelerator cards and memory to play new games with more demanding requirements in 1994.
It had already been out for a while (2013) when I got it (2015), but it lasted and worked very well, until I upgraded to the 5700xt (late 2019), which I'm still using and still works (mostly) great.
First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.
A Monster 2 8 MB. I remember being angry at my parents that they didn't get me the 12 MB version. But I couldn't formulate my anger because I didn't understand the difference between system and GPU RAM.
Still, I was amazed how quickly weapon switching now was in Jedi Knight. And Unreal always looked thr best in Glide. And the included rotating donut demo with bump mapping was awesome! A feature that would go on to be touted as the revolutionary hot new shit even 20 years later.
ATI Rage something on AGP bus, no 3D acceleration, certainly no Openssl etc, but it had hardware MPEG2 decoding, you know, for DVD
My parents later bought me GeForce 2 MX400, in 2007 i bought a new PC with my own money (first salary) with GeForce 7300GT, later upgraded it to 9600GT, then Radeon HD 7770, GTX 1050 and now RX 6600, it's a Theseus's PC at this point
My brother and I after putting our allowances together as kids got either a Voodoo 2 or 3 (can't remember anymore) in order to run quake 2 better back in 1999.
My single-slot Radeon HD 6770 from PowerColor was quite nice, although outrageously loud toward the end of its lifespan. Bit of a dead end from the start though (last of TeraScale, never got Vulkan), but I still had a blast with it.
Upgraded my highschool family desktop I took to college with a GeForce 8800 GT , used until I build a new pc with a Radeon 7970 GHz edition, which was replaced with a rx580 after the card passed away from light coin poisoning. Desktop is now running unRAID and my new main rig has a gtx 3070 in.
Mine was an ELSA Erazor III LT (the name somehow stuck). It was an offer that was bundled with horribly bad and clumly mechanical shutter 3D goggles. I remember trying Half Life with it. It was rattling all the time and the 3D effect was mediocre.
It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.
The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that's just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.
Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.