The first Radeon was superior to Nvidia's GeForce2 in almost every way but it set the tone for how AMD would fair against the jolly green giant for the next 25 years

A photo of the AMD Radeon logo on a graphics card.

It only seems like yesterday when I got my hands on ATI Technologies' first and much-anticipated Radeon graphics card but time has a funny way of playing tricks on your memory, and it was 25 years ago—to this very week—as I managed to easily pick one up at launch (how times have changed). The Radeon DDR joined my reasonably sized collection of graphics cards; on paper, it was the best of them all.

But what transpired over the following months not only put me off Radeon cards for a good while, until the 9700 appeared in 2002, but it also set the tone as to how ATI and eventually AMD would fare against Nvidia in the graphics card market.