worst GPU you've ever had ?

never had a bad gpu, bought some poorly manufactured 1s, but never a bad perfomer.
how?, i do my on the research performance from multiple sources and never just take some 1s word for whats good and whats not.

https://www.youtube.com/user/LinusTechTips
https://www.youtube.com/user/razethew0rld
https://www.youtube.com/user/Jayztwocents
https://www.youtube.com/user/AwesomeSauceNews
https://www.youtube.com/user/HardwareCanucks
https://www.youtube.com/user/paulshardware
https://www.youtube.com/user/pcper
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32899.html
all good sources of information.
 

brett1042002

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Jun 17, 2009
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Ati 4850 512mb. Overheated so much. Ended up sticking a $50 aftermarket GPU cooler on it. Helped tremendously, but then one day it died. I stuck it in the oven in an attempt to reflow solder it as a last resort. To my surprise, it worked. I replaced it with a 4890 some time later.
 
Nvidia Riva128. This was apparently their second graphics card ever, back when they were an unknown also-ran company trying to break into the 3D video card industry that 3Dfx had created. In a cost-cutting move, my company put one in my development box instead of a 3Dfx card.

I spent a week trying to track down an instant blue-screen crash bug in my code without success. When a co-worker tried my code and it ran fine on her computer, that got me to look for problems specific to my hardware. I eventually tracked down the problem to a hardware bug in the nvidia card. The card claimed to support a DirectX function but didn't, resulting in the instant blue-screen. When I told DirectX to do that particular function in software, it ran just fine.

For wasting a week of my life, it gets my title of worst GPU ever.
 

TripleHeinz

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Aug 29, 2014
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Hmmm, interesting question, lots of nostalgia. :'(

Aside from an old Trident PCI with 1MB of VRAM that was impossible to find a driver for Windows XP (confined to Standard VGA driver forever), I had a bad experience developing with a AMD 5770. I still consider the card very very good but had problems with the drivers to be more specific, it was a buggy D3D9 implementation that wasted almost 3 weeks of my life. It could have been any AMD card at the moment but it happened to be that one I had for development and that is why I must consider it my worst card.
Lots of mobile chips that had to hack drivers too.

:'( I know that the subject is about worst GPU but I couldn't resist to honor the good fallen ones. I've have had many brands and models of video cards and I really can't say they were bad cards, they all served their purpose at the time and that is why I got them. From what I still remember:

- Diamond S3 Savage 4: UT99 with MeTaL renderer FTW! I absolutely loved this card.
- 3dfx Voodoo3 PCI: Unreal with Glide renderer FTW!
- 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP: Used for developing Glide 3 but got it as a novelty after 3dfx had gone. I still have it.
- SIS 8MB ATI Rage based AGP: Used mainly for debugging PCs.
- ATI Rage 128 Pro: A really good card for the time. This one had TV output unlike many others.
- MSI Geforce2 MX: Played "Black n White" nicely.
- Geforce4 MX 4000: UT 2003...mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmister crow!
- After a few years with crappy laptop gpus I then jumped to the MSI Geforce GTS 450, Saphire 5770 vapor-x, eVGA Geforce 750 ti. I'm now settled for the low-mid range and will continue to do so in the future.
 

imrazor

Distinguished
I have three contenders for this award.

1) PNY Geforce 4200 Ti - died after a couple of months, PNY couldn't be bothered to replace it
2) Geforce 5600 - For the price, the performance was cr**.
3) XFX Radeon 5770 - No matter what I did, this thing just would not work with my Gigabyte P35-DS3L mobo. It would run for a little while, then blue screen or display pretty rainbow artifacts. It totally stumped XFX. But the stupid thing worked fine with the Asus motherboard I bought years later.
 

witherskeleton85

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Aug 17, 2017
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Really? Man, you're lucky. My dad works at WD in California and they throw away a lot of old parts. I used to use a NVidia Quadro NVS 295. That thing didn't even come with a fan. Luckily, I'm upgrading to a GT 9600 that can actually render 3D. Ironically, because WD tossed a lot of parts, I have a really buffed motherboard running on FOUR Xeon 8894-V4s with 64 GB RAM each. My room is a microwave.
 

witherskeleton85

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Aug 17, 2017
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I run on an NVidia Quadro NVS 295. It overheats when trying 3D. Once I opened my computer when there were no apps open and felt the heatsink (with an antistatic wristband, of course) and I almost got burned. With a blisteringly fast *slow* 8 cores (YEAH, EIGHT) and 256 MB GDDR3, it doesn't even need a fan. I'm upgrading soon to a GT 9600 from Asus.
 

Matt_163

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Jan 4, 2017
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I dont know how a NVIDIA 8400gs with 256mb stands against that, but I could render 3d animations. It took 3 days to render a 10 second youtube intro... the fan on it is broken and it is hot to the touch. Not to help with the fact that I have two monitors running off it
 

witherskeleton85

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Aug 17, 2017
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That is one heck of a tiny cooler. My newer destop (get this, my dad works at a company that throws a lot of new and expansive parts) works on *ahem* 4X Xeon 8894-V4 with 4X Geforce Titan Xp. I have yet to figure out a way to overpower it.
 
VisionTek ATI X1300 128MB PCI (not Express, didn't have AGP or PCIe mobo :/ ). It was my first ever dedicated GPU, overpaid for it (~$130 I think) at Circuit City. It served its purpose though. I bought the GPU for $130 and 1GB of DDR RAM for $99. Circa 2006.
 

mpc007

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The mobile ATI Radeon Xpress 200M I had in my first pc, a Dell Inspiron 1501. It was utter crap, even while the notebook costed around 800 EUR the graphics were complete shite, it couldnt run a single recent game of those years (2008) fluently. My first aftermarket dedicated GPU I bought was a HD4670 and it was ten times better for less than 100 bucks. Still running it in a secondary system, and only recently shows its age because it lacks DX11.