For my first gaming rig (gift)? GTX 980.

With my own money? 2080 TI

evga GTX 770 It never died Replaced it with an evga GTX1080 it blew up 2 months out of warranty. they sent me rtx 2070 despite the warranty(MISS YOU EVGA). I gave that card to my wife and upgraded to a 3080 from aorus.
the card is great, but the software that comes with the card is beyond awful. I will probably get an Asus next time.

It was some on board gpu with my super amazing AMD K6-2, it couldn't even run mega man X without chugging. Then a friend gave me an S3 Virge with a glorious 4mb vram.

Riva TNT 16MB, brand name Elsa, card called Erazor.

That would be a gt 8800. It was a gift from a friend when I build my first pc.

With some tweaking, it ran great for years even though it was quite old by the time it was given to me. It had some features I kinda miss in newer gpu's

Mine was an ELSA Erazor III LT (the name somehow stuck). It was an offer that was bundled with horribly bad and clumly mechanical shutter 3D goggles. I remember trying Half Life with it. It was rattling all the time and the 3D effect was mediocre.

The first I bought for myself was a PNY XLR8 GeForce GTS 250 in 2010. It tided me over for 4 years, until my power supply gave a loud POP, and I replaced pretty much the whole build just in case the other parts were damaged (or caused the damage).

A Cirrus Logic, on VLB on my 486DX/40, with 4 MB of RAM, and a SoundBlaster card. December 1994.

As a teen in the 2010s, my first GPU was an Nvidia 680m in a Sager (Clevo) laptop.

That thing could power through just about anything I'd throw at it. Good times.

Intel i740. Awesome bang for buck card in the late 90s!

AMD Radeon 6300M.

Or if mobile doesn't count: GTX 1060-6GB

First computer I built had a BFG 7600gt with the first upgrade I ever did was a BFG 8800gt

Miss BFG and EVGA for nvidia cards.

I had an s3 virge card. Amazingly bad, it basically was no faster than cpu rendering, but looked a bit better. I spent so much time trying to trick games into running on it.

Nvidia GT 9400.

rx580. still have it on top of a shelf.

The first one I got was some integrated cirrus logics chip that didn't even have 3d acceleration. The first one I bought with my own money was a GeForce 7800GT in late 2005

I have no idea what i had in my earliest PCs, but the first 3d graphics card was the 3dfx Orchid Righteous 3d.

A GeForce 9 series

ATI Mach32 EISA. It looked to good on paper, but somehow, it did not make DOS go brrrrrr 😟