r/RetroGPUUniverse

Hi all. New here. Wish to share in gpu good times.

Here's a Geforce 7950 I saw sold on ebay new and boxed. I'd seen the card before, but not the box.

In the early 2000s, PowerVR offered an excellent value and an alternative to NVIDIA and ATI in their KYRO series. It featured a tile-based rendering technology that allowed it to only render parts of a scene that were visible and thus offered impressive performance - even if it didn't have the raw horsepower of some of its competition. And yes, I am aware that the capacitors on this board are getting a little pudgy. I'll have to replace those soon.

My first dual gpu, crashed 9 out of 10 times when trying to utilize both chips. Ended up upgrading to Voodoo 5500.

I love PowerVR stuff. These early models don't even feature a display output because they sent their 3D image to the 2D card's frame buffer over the PCI bus.

The Intel 740, released in 1998, was essentially Intel's only discrete graphics chip until Arc in 2022. It was released as an attempt to highlight the new AGP interface. It shipped with only 2-8MB of VRAM when some competitors had as much as 32MB. Supposedly it would overcome this by using AGP's new technology of fetching textures from system memory, but this turned out to be a very slow process and overall performance was disappointing.

This particular card comes from an OEM batch, so the manufacturer is kinda difficult to trace. It's the SDR version, nothing special about it, but I'm super happy to have it in my collection, especially now that these cards are getting pricey.

Black-Edition

I've always loved the look of the HD 5000 series cards. This dual GPU card is LONG. Even without the support bracket, it's as long as my GeForce 3090 Ti, and this was in 2009.

To think that this was released just seven months after the 3870 X2. The rate of product releases back then was just insane. This was ATI's second dual GPU card of 2008.

This was ATI's first dual chip card since the Rage Fury MAXX. It also finally gave ATI fans a card with performance that could exceed a GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra in games that took good advantage of CrossFire.

I got this duo not too long ago from a friend and they are one of my favorite things to play around with under Windows XP. ATI made some improvements with this iteration of CrossFire, but it was still done with an external cable.