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[badblue]

Going from a laptop that could barely run Fallout 3 to the near top of the line (for the time) PC with a i7 4770k and a 780ti.

 

[flying_sq]

Probably HDD to SSD, in modern pc history, other than multi core, I don't think anything comes close.

 

[MarkyG]

I went absolutely balls deep, scorched earth earlier this year. I put it down to a midlife crisis and having no social life, lol. Bagged myself the following:

Intel i9 13900K CPU (upgrade from i7 9700K)
32GB DDR5 6400Mhz (upgrade from 32GB DDR4 3200Mhz)
Corsair H150i Elite LCD cooler (upgrade from NZXT X62)
RTX 4090 GPU (upgrade from 3080Ti)

All hooked up to my Asus PG42UQ OLED.

I'm good for the foreseeable.

 

[BennyBlanco]

3080 —> 4090

 

[OverHeat]

is it really that big of a jump?? I have a 3090 now.

Massive in some cases

 

[simpatico]

I use to buy the highest end GTX every few years. 285 -> Titan -> 680 -> 1080. But now the price for the xx80 is so damn high I don't know if I'm gonna re-up. Might grab a xx70Ti this go round.

 

[chaseroni]

GTX 760 to 1070ti, that shit was awesome.

 

[nemiroff]

Going from no GPU to a 3dfx GPU. Even my RTX4090 from a 10GB RTX3080 can't beat that, can it? Hmm..

 

[Black_Stride]

I cant believe 64GB was actually enough for my C drive.
I just looked up the first SSD i got I was sure it was a 128GB......nope.
It was this fucker:

 

[Clintizzle]

GTX980 -> RTX3080

 

[Rubicaant]

Had some Voodoo card, upgraded to an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. was the biggest upgrade ever. That beast had 128 MB of DDR 1 Ram. 325 GPU Clockspeed. Could actually play EverQuest with the clip plane at max, sometimes.

 

[Rickyiez]

Pentium 486 100mhz to Pentium 3 600mhz with Riva Tnt 2

I could finally load Starcraft instantly after that upgrade , before it was a damn long wait between each map .

From this

To these (so much nostalgia )

 

[MikeM]

I went absolutely balls deep, scorched earth earlier this year. I put it down to a midlife crisis and having no social life, lol. Bagged myself the following:

Intel i9 13900K CPU (upgrade from i7 9700K)
32GB DDR5 6400Mhz (upgrade from 32GB DDR4 3200Mhz)
Corsair H150i Elite LCD cooler (upgrade from NZXT X62)
RTX 4090 GPU (upgrade from 3080Ti)

All hooked up to my Asus PG42UQ OLED.

I'm good for the foreseeable.

3080 —> 4090

 

[Gameplay Gods Bless]

What upgrade to your PC did you make that DRASTICALLY improved performance in every facet?
I have only been doing this PC gaming thing for a year now... but going from a 5600g to a 5600x + 6650 XT was AMAZING. So many games that i ran at sub FHD could be maxed out at 1440p with good performance, it was great.

GPU wise I went from an Nvidia 6200... LE. A 6200 would be like a RTX 4020 lol but it wasn't just a 6200 it was the LE version that was the most crippled version of them all. It had what was it, either 64MB or 128MB of VRAM lol. I went from that to an amazing AMD 7870 with 2GB of VRAM, it destroyed every game at played at 1080p in 2012, it also obliterated all my consoles. The PS3 and 360 were dinosaurs compared to the 7870 and funny enough the PS4 GPU became a 7870 but the weaker laptop version. Hell of an upgrade!

CPU wise I went from a Q6600, a 2007 era Intel quad core to a monster Intel i7 6700k in 2015. Another monster upgrade. God bless PC gaming .

 

[Lasha]

680 to 1080 was a major jump in every aspect. 1080 to 4070TI has been great but nowhere near as impactful.

 

[LaughingStock]

My 4090 was already a beast. But now that it's paired with a 7800X3D it's unbelievable.
Ironically, the two games that I've been playing lately, Jedi Survivor and Zelda TOTK don't run very well...

 

[CGNoire]

GTX 260 to a GTX 1080

...and soon from a GTX 1080 to a RTX 4090.

 

[killatopak]

unironically a laptop.

Convenience means a lot more to me.

 

[IlGialloMondadori]

Going to show my age here, but let me tell you, the jumps in graphics, sound etc... was so much bigger in the early days of gaming 80s-90s than today. Even 2000s were more jumps.
Going from a 386sx 16mhz 2d graphics to a pentium 2 with 3d graphics in 1999. I gamed primarly on genesis -> ps1 during those years between 94-99 as my pc was shit by then. Was great for 1990-94.

I went from :
386sx 16mhz
1mb edo ram, 40mb hdd,
1mb oak graphics mem SuperVGA card (649x480 64k colors at once, or 800x600 256 colors at once)
Sound Blaster pro
1x cd rom, 2400k baud modem
windows 3.1

To a:
Pentium 2 (clone cyrix cpu) 266mhz mmx pc socket7,
32mb edo ram , 2gb hdd
Voodoo 3 16mb pci card (16bit 3d)
CDRW drive, 56k modem
Windows 98se

It was like going from a ford escort to a sports car.
Of course I wasn't satisfied. That cyrix chip was shit. I got the pc from my coz for $200 so I wasn't complaining.
I slapped a voodoo5 in there, and a sb live. The sblive actually gave me 5-20fps boost as the cpu was so bad for 3d that offloading sound to dedicated hardware helped so much.

A year later i did my first full build a Pentium 3 650mhz, 256mb sdram, Geforce3, dvd and broadband.

and

To this:

Major jump both in 2d and 3d. It was like going up a decade in hardware.

Now if you mean more modern, I would say going from a nvidia 6800 to 8800gts. Crysis was awesome on that.
Going from nvida 1060gtx to 3060ti rtx was a jump (especially for the wallet) but outside of ray tracing, and fps there isn't much difference.


Borfore the 386 i was working with a 8088 8bit cpu, 256k ram pc with 16k cga graphics, pc speaker(beeps and boops) 2 5.25in floppies and no hard disk, DOS 2.11. The games looked like this.
So going from that to a 386 with vga/svga and sound blaster was amazing too!

and if go further back some consoles and apple computer:


Atari 2600:

Apple iic:

Intellivision:

I had NES and TurboGrafx16 as well in the 80s. This was quite the jump from NES... but this thread seems more pc based, although i will post the screenshot, of one of my favorite games, along with it's brother Devi's Crush.
No one really made video pinball like those two games again, sadly.

from NES:

to TG16:

Yes. The Crush games are incredible.

 

[KungFucius]

Must be something from ancient times for me. For the last 12 or so years everything was incremental. I update either mobo and or CPU, or GPU. In 2019 I went from an 8 year old i5 rig to an AMD x570 rig that I still have today but initially kept the 1080 in it. I have since went from 3700XT to 5900XT and 3090 then 4090. I want to upgrade the CPU and mobo when there is something compelling. I would like a platform that can support a future CPU upgrade.

 

[crackajack]

I think everyone who was on PC pre SSDs can agree this has to be one of if not the biggest upgrades unless you go back way way back.

nope. dont agree.
SSDs are imho the same class as HDR or 4k (maybe even 144Hz displays), nice to have but not really a massive upgrade like other components are, ie CPUs (speed and core count) and GPU and more faster RAM that accelarates everything all the time nonstop and not just let's say shortens the coffee break. Sure, faster loading is nice, but only some PS4 games loaded realy really re ea aa ll ly slow (RDR2, Metro Exodus), but even PS3 was imho usually fast enough to not be annoying. While on PC some programs still seem to unpack whatever and take their time with SSDs. Launching my oldass Linux laptop on a regular 5400rpm disk isn't that much slower than the modern laptop and current PCs I use with SSDs. Sure faster in seconds, but perceivably still within my this is acceptable timeframe. After the intial boot and start of programs SSDs speeds are not really doing much for anything. Going from 7200rpm directly to M2 might have made a bigger impact, but SATA SSDs were nowhere close to what improvement in smoothness a first DualCore or what gains GPUs brought when Geforce was still a new label.

 

[lefty1117]

going from 16GB RAM to 32GB RAM was like getting a new pC

 

[Unknown?]

Last year I went from Windows 10 i3 3rd gen 4gb ram laptop w hdd to a Linux Mint Coreboot i7 11th gen and 32gb ram laptop w 7gb/s SSD.

Biggest upgrade was ditching Windows permanently though.

 

[kraspkibble]

recently upgraded from a 7700k/2080 to a 7800x3d/4080. i only upgraded to a 4080 at first but realised i was being heavily bottlenecked even at 1440p so went for a 7800x3d and with the move to AM5 (DDR5/PCIE5) i went with 64GB ram as i already had 32GB. i do have a PCIE4 ssd now but loading speeds don't feel any faster. maybe when Directstorage becomes more common in games.

i don't think ive ever had such a huge upgrade. Before I was running cyberpunk at 60fps with no RTX and now i can run it at 110-140fps with RTX overdrive. Microsoft Flight Simulator is easily managing beyond 60fps now when before it was at 20-30fps.

 

[Black_Stride]

nope. dont agree.
SSDs are imho the same class as HDR or 4k (maybe even 144Hz displays), nice to have but not really a massive upgrade like other components are, ie CPUs (speed and core count) and GPU and more faster RAM that accelarates everything all the time nonstop and not just let's say shortens the coffee break. Sure, faster loading is nice, but only some PS4 games loaded realy really re ea aa ll ly slow (RDR2, Metro Exodus), but even PS3 was imho usually fast enough to not be annoying. While on PC some programs still seem to unpack whatever and take their time with SSDs. Launching my oldass Linux laptop on a regular 5400rpm disk isn't that much slower than the modern laptop and current PCs I use with SSDs. Sure faster in seconds, but perceivably still within my this is acceptable timeframe. After the intial boot and start of programs SSDs speeds are not really doing much for anything. Going from 7200rpm directly to M2 might have made a bigger impact, but SATA SSDs were nowhere close to what improvement in smoothness a first DualCore or what gains GPUs brought when Geforce was still a new label.

So you in fact do agree that we would have to go way way back to feel the same upgrade that SSDs brought.

The first GeForce thats 1999.
The first Dual Core thats 2005.

Alot of this forum wasnt even alive mate.

Simply adding an SSD to even older machines massively reduced boot times, clicking My Computer and it actually opening up instantaneously?........day to day PC usage the SSD made life so much easier.

 

[kraspkibble]

SSDs were a huge upgrade on PCs there is no denying that. Boot times and system responsiveness improve alot thanks to SSDs. I got my first SSD in 2008 and it was like black magic. I couldn't go back to spinning drives after that except in situations it doesn't matter. I mean, I still have a 5400rpm external HDD in use today but it's for backing up my NVME ssd that is inside my PC. I use it maybe once a month. Over time I moved from SATA ssds to Nvme SSDs. all the drives in my PC are now NVME SSDs.

As for gaming on PC i really don't believe it matters what SSD you use. You might run into some issues on a SATA ssd but it should still be fast enough. NVME is future proof even at gen 3. Consoles have only just made the jump from old spinning drives to PCIE 4 gen speeds which is an insane massive jump. It's not like they went from 7200rpm drives to SATA. They went from 5400rpm to PCIE4 nvme.

SSDs are great but right now they only significantly improve loading speeds. In the next few years I think we'll see more use out of SSDs as PC transitions to DirectStorage and next gen consoles will probably move to PCIE5.

It still stands that upgrading your CPU/RAM/GPU will have a larger impact on your gaming experience. You could still be running a basic ass SATA SSD and have a great experience and not necessarily any better than current gen consoles.. Anyone using a HDD to game on PC these day is asking for trouble.

 

[Justin9mm]

I went from an FX-8350 + R290 I built many moons ago to a 7700X + 3080 that I built in January. I'd say that was a pretty big upgrade!

 

[Kenpachii]

HDD to SSD by miles.

from a 580gtx to 2x 290's in crossfire.
probably from voodoo 2 to geforce 2 ti massive upgrade.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

3080Ti to 4090 I suppose.

 

[Mr Wonderstuff]

2070 super to 4090. I would never normally do that (I'm a '70 sort of person - 570-970-2070) but running a 4k/120hz screen necessitated it.

 

[H4ze]

It was buying a GTX1070 around launch to swap out my 660 ti. Good times.

 

[rofif]

You scrubs.
It was 3dfx voodoo. This one here.
I keep mine on my Great Pyramid. You got nothing on me.
SHINY REFLECTIVE FLOORS IN UNREAL

 

[XesqueVara]

750ti to 1070ti.
HD to SSD was great too.

 

[LostDonkey]

144hz Freesync monitor for me.

To be able to disengage vsync and let the monitor match the refresh rate to the game with no tearing or stutter.

Bliss