Well most people wouldn't really know the name of a company like that until they were 15 or so, and 30 is when the back pain really starts to hit so it seems pretty accurate.
Damn, I hope you got a good payout. The logo is for a taiwanese foundry called Silicon Integrated Systems; they used to make very cheap chipsets and stuff like that.
Thank you for the memory! The first "retail" card I ever purchased (from a small town computer shop), literally just said AGP Graphics Adapter on the box... and inside was a delightfully generic SiS board, with which I had many fun hours.
Mid 40s and the two weeks my buddy lent me his voodoo 2, which was CPU-INDEPENDENT, were some of the best times I had playing FF7 on my DX4. I should have my prostate checked.
IIRC that was the ideal GPU to play Half-life 2. My 9700m could not keep up. I was only 16 at the time, so I fell for the lies from the DELL salesman when I was buying my first gaming machine for that game. He told me that mobile GPUs are almost as good as desktop GPUs, and that the 9700m was almost as good as the 9800 desktop card. It was not.
Barely got 30 FPS on medium, and I couldn't run it at the laptop's native resolution of 1900x1200. Had to settle for 1280x800 and the crappy upscaling of the time.
I worked my ass off an entire summer for that stupid brick of a laptop (it was a first gen XPS, BTW), and it couldn't even do 60 FPS in the latest games. I was betrayed so hard by that purchase that I learned how to build my own PCs so I'd never have to settle for an overpriced "gaming" laptop ever again.
Oh jeez. Fuck that salesman. :( That's an awful thing to do to a kid. Money comes so hard at that age.
I had a self build and a decent CRT at the time so scaling wasn't an issue but I remember how horrible it was in those days on LCDs. It actually put me off moving from the CRT for a long time.
I definitely overclocked that card and it was really good for that even on the stock cooler but I do vaguely remember it struggling with HL2. I can't remember what CPU I had so that could have been the bottleneck.
I remember this brand fondly but, my back and knee pains aren't from age but from getting side-swipped by an SUV on my motorcycle a few years ago. 30s isn't old, it's just adult, instead of young adult of the 20s.
My first Video card was Cirrus Logic. Spent $110 dollars to get 2 512KB memory chips to add to the card, but combined the 2MB video made Wing Commander III look great!
Same ... but interestingly for 3Dfxs fall I was still an invincible young lad, not knowing the meaning of chronic pain (or about that becoming the norm for a good day). Im still nostalgically sad about 3Dfx, and the later acquisition by nVidia ... which then fucking used the SLI brand but made the acronym mean something else. It was not necessary.
gonna fire up my ATI capture card and get my STANDARD DEF XL-1 footage into FCP 2.1....probably lay down some sweet Thievery Corporation track as a my background music.
If you remember this brand and your back and knees hurt you probably shoulda spent more time exercising, but the good news is it probably isnt too late to eat healthy and take care of your body.
The 9x00 Gen ATI cards were awesome. The 9500 could be modded into an honest to goodness 9700. The 9700 was just a downclocked 9700pro. The things you could do with bios mods and a little overclocking were just great.
My back gets sore just thinking about all the time I spent crawling around my PC case on the floor.