Parents dropped £150 notes on a Voodoo card of some kind (too young to remember the model) so I could play Incoming. The game itself was bundled with the PC, but it was incapable of playing it. We had a Tiny PC with a massive 21" CRT, Zip drive, CD Rom and it came bundled with Encarta and Office 98 When I had my own PC (early-mid 2000's) I spent quite a bit of pocket money on an ATI 9250 so I could play Ragnarok Online with my friends at school. We where on dial up at the time so I had to wait until after everyone had used the phone to log in and play! Bought a whole new 939 based system and a ATI x1900 so I could play WOW (to poor for an AM2 system at the time) Later upgraded to a Zotac AMP 8800 and an AM3 system so I could play the later expansions. I've bought allot of cards and entire systems to satisfy the need to play a single game! But then again my youth was heavily influenced by games and all of my friends kept me driven to upgrade. Recently dumped £100 on these very forums to buy myself an XFX R9 270 to replace my ageing 6850 and play the latest update of WOT on decent settings!
I wouldn't say I buy for specific games, but the things that spur me in to looking for a new card is when I can't play a new game maxed out settings wise, or the purchase of a new higher resolution screen. So, in recent(ish) times, I ran at 1920x1200 on a 560Ti. I then purchased a 2560x1440 monitor, which meant I needed a new card, ending up with a GTX 580 1.5GB. After that, I was seeing that newer games were struggling a bit at that resolution, so I switched it up to a GTX 680 2GB. Again, after a year had passed I then went up to a GTX 780 3GB, which has so far solved my 'problem'. On the horizon, I'm viewing another resolution upgrade that goes hand in hand with Star Citizen. My intention is a 21:9 main monitor at 2560x1080, flanked by a pair of 1080p monitors. This, with all the shiny bits turned on, will no doubt need something more than a GTX 780, so I'll be looking for a new card or two in another 12-18 months. By that point my GTX 780 will be over two years old, so I'm happy to put it out to pasture and in to the Hadron rig (GTX 770 right now) that's going to remain on single screen. Actually, saying all that, I did buy a GeForce2 GTS 64MB just to play Quake III at 60fps to the envy of my friends. The rest of my card purchases over the years have just reflected the system, ending up pretty 'balanced' with the other components.
The £99 I spent on an Orchid Righteous 3D 3dFX Voodoo accelerator (4MB VRAM, people!) remains one of my best investments, even allowing for inflation. Mechwarrior 2 with the 3dFX patch was amazing. Still got the card, too. Somewhere.
What I loved about the Voodoo cards was that you could take the most wanky GPU in the world (a 1mb S3 for example) and it would turn your PC into something that could produce the most amazing graphics you'd ever seen for just £99 or so. Quake 2 absolutely took my breath away. From the bodies going into chunks when hit hard enough to the flies buzzing around the dead bodies (well, 4 pixel long black lines hehe) but still, the detail compared to regular graphics cards was just phenomenal. These days you're lucky to get any change from £300 on a half decent graphics card that can run games on their max settings, and they just don't seem to have the impact that the original Glide titles had. Nvidia turned the graphics card into a designer product and now because of that we have designer prices. It's all a bit of a shame really. We keep seeing all of these new graphics cards that are supposedly going to blow our socks off yet all they do is run the games we could already play with higher frame counts. It's also mad how people count frames these days. Personally when I game I never monitor the FPS unless something doesn't feel right. Glad I don't really it's a bit obsessive.
I didn't buy my GPUs for a specific game - I bought them for my monitor actually The upgrade to 1440p was too much for one 680 in some games on max settings. I don't think I'd buy a GPU for just one game - especially considering the amount I'd need to spend to improve on two 680s...
I was totally blow away by it at the time! Quite tempted to see if I can find it anyone and fudge it into working just for a bit of a nostalgia trip! Oh wow a whole 4MB, saying that the Voodoo 2 was still going strong until 3 or so years ago! The parents shipped the whole thing off to my nan in Croydon. The whole thing finally died in 2011, nan upgraded to a laptop last year. Some AMD A10 monstrosity! 900fps in solitaire
Buy a GPU just for a game, um, I bought three I built a new PC about 18 months ago and bought a 560GTX thinking that would do me for a while as I was only going to play Oblivion with a few mods and it did the job fine, then at the beginning of 2013 Crysis 3 was released and the 560 struggled so I bought a GTX670 which sorted that out but then I saw some Skyrim videos which blew me away, vanilla Skyrim is not a very GPU intensive game and even with the HD texture packs and loads of other mods the 670 could handle it no problem but the videos I saw used mods called ENB's which are amazing and even considering the fact that you don't need more than 60 FPS as Skyrim physics can do all sorts of weird things at faster frame rates, getting Skyrim with an ENB mod to run at a constant 60 FPS is a real GPU killer. I wanted to "play" Skyrim as it was in the videos, I didn't want to just make videos so I bought the 780 and I can now play Skyrim as it looks in the videos but there are still some areas in the game when the FPS drop to around 50 but these are known FPS hot spots and seem to be an issue with the game as they are often not particularly intensive GPU areas, also, Skyrim has a limit of 3.1GB VRAM so no point in a 4GB card. I will be playing and modding Skyrim for quite a while so even if a must have game is released that my GPU can't handle I won't be buying another card for a while...probably
I have been tempted but never..ever.. done it. I've just settled for horrible looking games or not bothered at all I do eventually get myself a new pc when I strain to play anything current on the most horrendous detail (or my existing stuff will only run with a desk fan pointed into the case).
