I'm playing Control now. It was playable on my GTX970, but not how I like it. Since I play most games only once (sadly I don't have eternal life), I want them to look/sound/play at their best.

The past 2 years, GPUs were way too expensive, but that was OK, I had a big backlog. I recently bought an RTX 3060Ti second hand. It still feels like I don't really need it (backlog), but I'm happy to be able to play Control, TW3, Metro Exodus, ... (it's actually not a big list)

I don't remember the first one I played when I upgraded from a GTX275 to a GTX970.

I haven't had a graphics card upgrade, but knowing me, the first game I would have played after upgrading it would probably have been either some DOS game, some 16-bit or earlier game in an emulator, or some indie game that has low system requirements (and would have run without the update).

So... you wouldn't upgrade your current GPU, because you have no reason to.

Quake II RTX. Amazing to see the difference that it made.

On my previous upgrade (GTX 275 to GTX 660), it was probably GTA IV.

Funny because that's actually what I did after replacing my old laptop with GTX 1660 desktop some two years back, I literally started with Akalabeth playthrough and then went on to play Ultima 1 for nth time. I did play newer games like Witcher 3 on ultra etc since though so it wasn't really a waste. Well, that, and the fact that I really upgraded for work more than for games.

Perhaps there's a game I want to play that requires an upgrade (or runs slowly without one and at minimum settings), but once I actually install the new GPU, I don't feel like playing that game right away.

Interesting question, but which time?

I've had a number of different cards, a couple of them even had 2 gpu's, and sometimes the older cards were better; same with their drivers. They wouldn't do well now, except on games over 10 years old, but my semi-ancient 980ti still holds up pretty well, as long as ray tracing isn't factored in.

Yeah, when?

For the first time in a very long time I had to actually install a card to run FEZ. That was a while ago. The only reason I upgraded was to cram more memory into the space of a low profile card. I'm up to 4 GB now.

Probably one of the first games I gave a spin to when I got my current GTX 1080 was Ashes Of The Singularity - Escalation. I couldn't really get decent performance out of it on a 1050 Ti (Mobile), which is what I had before I (permanently) switched back to desktop PCs.

The first game I played on my new gaming PC was Among us, ironically. The first game I played on my 1080 was The Witcher 3. To get everything maxed out at a buttery smooth 60FPS was indeed AWESOME. The first game I was looking forward to playing on my new PC (with a shiny RTX3070) was Cyberpunk, with RTX features enabled (kind of a let down how that had such a minor effect o n the game.

Any time, any upgrade/game you still remember. ;-)

I just remembered something:
Around the time that I got my GTX970, I also upgraded my CPU (Core2 E8400 -> i7 6700). The first thing I did was finish Star Craft 2: Wings of Liberty. It was on hold for a few year, because that final mission really needed a 4 core CPU.


Bummer!

It makes a nice difference in Control. I'm still going to test if Medium vs High makes a lot of difference (Visually, and if the lower than 60 is such a bad thing).
I watched a few videos on Youtube - it's supposed to be well implemented in Metro Exodus as well.

I suppose that people who play their games at a very fast pace also miss out on a lot of graphic details...

Oh yeah, I was marveling at the window reflections in Control for a while. I enjoyed running around the reception area at the beginning with that cause it was damn cool, and you never realize how much that was missing in games until you get to see it live. Just something so different.

Well, I switched from a Nvidia card over to an AMD Card, then upgraded to an AMD Pro.

I think. Point is, Nvidia has always been awful to Linux...and anyone else who has worked with them. Before that point I was probably swinging an 8 MB card back whence that would have been the thing to swing.

Don't actually remember the details all that well, but way back I was playing SW: TOR (the mmo) with an old video card on low everything. Then i found a better card for a good price at the time, changed the settings to high and wow, the colours! It was an amazing difference and it felt like exploring an entirely new game.
I spent a few hours that day just walking around and appreciating the vibrancy...

It was not long after I bought and eventually upgraded my first PC ((and my first personal experience of Windows (98SE)) around 1999, after being an Amiga ((A500 Plus, A1200 (040), CD32)) user from around 1991. Said PC was equiped with an all singing and dancing 8MB generic PCI graphic card. Which was pretty swiftly upgraded to a Nvidia Riva TNT2 32MB AGP graphics card around 6 months later. The grahics and speed improvements to my then favourite game (Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II) was phenominal. I was able to play it at an almost constant 60 FPS, compared to the around 8-15 FPS I think I remember getting from that dire 8MB card...