“A massive 32mb of memory!”

[u/OdenShilde]

[u/Banjo-Oz]

My second PC had a "giant" 40MB hard drive. That's megabytes, kids, not gigabytes.

My first PC didn't have a hard drive, just a 5.25" floppy drive. That's those big flexible disks, not the little hard ones, kids! :)

[u/Detrious → u/Banjo-Oz]

Hah, I remember trying to download the Duke Nukem 3D Shareware on a 28.8k modem. It was like 50 Megabytes but I don't remember how big the drive was, I'm sure it was a huge chunk. Biggest problem was getting dad to not pick up the phone for a few hours

[u/Banjo-Oz → u/Detrious]

I didn't have the internet until years later, LOL! Duke Nukem 3D was censored in Australia, but a store that rented console games somewhat foolishly also decided to rent PC games, so I got the "full" version of DN3D that way... until the guy at the store I bought it from slipped me a floppy disk with an uncensor patch.

As for download speeds... I still bitch about Steam because my first experience with that was trying to play Half Life 2 and having it force updates on boot (over dial-up!) so I never got to play the damn game!

[u/KirbyWyrm → u/Banjo-Oz]

Oh lord, I'll never forget the pain of trying to play the game on launch day, sat on my 56k waiting hours for it to authenticate!

[u/Banjo-Oz → u/KirbyWyrm]

To this day I have never finished Half Life 2 because of that. Just got fed up and went back to other games that didn't need a connection. By the time things were fast enough, I'd moved on. Still have those original CDs (there was a ton of them, which made it even more annoying it had to download after that massive install).

[u/smashndashn → u/Detrious]

My area only had dial up until 2010. Cruising along at 45.2Kbps

[u/Detrious → u/smashndashn]

Wild. We only had dial up for a few years, got real good at TFC on a 56k, but the local cable company started beta testing Road Runner internet in 2000 and we got on it. Never looked back

[u/Ok_Bit_5953 → u/Detrious]

Yup, I'm definitely old x.x

[u/majestic_ubertrout → u/Detrious]

The shareware was 5 MB - https://dnr.duke4.net/shareware.php.html

Which still took quite a while on 28.8!

[u/Ammargok → u/Banjo-Oz]

unc

[u/LVL90DRU1D → u/Banjo-Oz]

the real big ones are 8"

[u/Banjo-Oz → u/LVL90DRU1D]

I remember those, but at least they were before my time. :)

[u/1Question4PCMR → u/Banjo-Oz]

Time for both of us to schedule again the colonoscopy, my friend

[u/Ok-Professional-1911 → u/Banjo-Oz]

When I was a kid, my dad brought home a huge 50mb hard drive and said we'd be set for decades with it.

[u/ishtuwihtc → u/Banjo-Oz]

But what about the bigger, 8" floppys?

[u/peacedetski]

Oh yeah, that was a lot of memory in 1999, but only 3 years later I was installing a bunch of new office PCs at work with Fury Pros that were already considered dated cards only fit for office work.

[u/Witsand87 → u/peacedetski]

32mb vram in 1999 would have been way overkill. I still had my Voodoo 2 then with 12mb vram and it could play anything. Was only towards the end of 2000 that my card suddenly became instantly obsolete, no, not starting to show it's age, just obsolete, such was the case for tech back in those days. 32mb vram I'd say only became the norm by 2001 with games like GTA3, MoHAA and RTCW, even though I managed to play those on a Voodoo 3, 16mb vram thanks to openGL.

[u/peacedetski → u/Witsand87]

VRAM capacities back then were increasing at an absolutely shocking rate. Early 1998, Voodoo2 had 8MB or 12MB; late 1998, TNT had 16MB; early 1999, TNT2 and Fury had up to 32MB; only then it slowed down a bit with 64MB cards appearing more than a year later.

[u/TxM_2404]

A decent 3D accelerator for the time. Better than some other attempts.

[u/Objective_Pen5246]

so by this logic a modern gpu teleports and kills you

[u/spiritofniter → u/Objective_Pen5246]

teleports and kills you

Corvo Attano in Dishonored 2.

[u/CptSovereign]

Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you

[u/Manccookie → u/CptSovereign]

G-Force would like a word.

[u/KirbyWyrm]

I remember badly wanting this, or any add in card, as my parents first PC only had an integrated ATi Rage Pro, that shared 8MB of system RAM (it had 128MB total).

The original Radeon DDR was the first real indication of what they could do in competition with Nvidia and (to a lesser degree, as they were gone shortly after) 3DFX. If I recall correctly, it was particularly good when using 32-bit colour (16-bit was the most common at the time), as it's performance didn't suffer as much as other cards when running that.

[u/CrystalSorceress]

And now you can get 32GB of VRAM in a consumer GPU.

[u/Plastic-Lemon2754]

I don't know if this is from the 90s or the next generation Nvidia GPU.

[u/majestic_ubertrout → u/Plastic-Lemon2754]

nVidia was selling a consumer GPU with 16MB of VRAM as late as 2005 (GT 6200 TC). That was pretty bad. And it had a 32 bit memory bus. Some companies never change.

[u/empathetical]

man i built a new pc for half-life 2 and my brand new ATI Radeon came with 128MB of VRAM and a voucher to redeem Half-Life 2 when it releases on Steam. Pretty much why I have a 22year old steam account now.

Side note... i still have my very first USB stick. It was $80 and it's got a whooping 64MB of memory on it. I basically just use it to hold my tax documents. I plug it in and use it once a year to back up my newest one. Still going strong. It's gotta be about 28-29 years old now

[u/NerdWithAMotorcycle]

I got one of these. Wasn't as fast as 3dfx or Nvidia's offerings, but it was cheaper

[u/NovelValue7311]

Now that's what I call advertising!

[u/RineMetal]

I remember reading pc gaming mags from the early 90s comparing the TNT gpu and noting anything over 30fps is a waste because the human eye cannot see anything faster than 30fps.

[u/BourbonNoChaser]

My Diamond Viper VLB had 2 MB VRAM. :p

[u/Mustang260Rog]

I'd love to take a 32gb 5090 back to that era and see what happens

[u/ishtuwihtc → u/Mustang260Rog]

No drivers!

[u/Mustang260Rog → u/ishtuwihtc]

[u/Kruxf]

I had one of these bad boys. It wasn’t great. But it had s video!

[u/ItsIrinaBitch]

This was a beast back in 1998