I can remember growing up my Dad purchased a new Pentium 133, this must have been around 1995/1996. It was absolutely cutting edge machine at the time and had a "S3 trio" PCI card in it. I have vague memories of playing Quake on it and being blown away at the graphics. A few years later 3dFX Glide cards were cutting edge for gaming.

I started university around that time stopped following gaming/computer hardware scene but really felt to me like Nvidia came from absolutely nowhere.