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Look at how unhinged GPU box art was in the 2000s (2024)

• 44 Comments
• I miss when gaming in general was less mainstream and more weird like this. Now the silicon manufacturers hate that they even have to sell us their scraps, let alone spend time on making unique designs for their boxes.
  I bought a small press book with a collection of this art and it was a fun little trip down memory lane, as I’ve owned some of the hardware (boxes) depicted in it.
  For anyone else interested: https://lockbooks.net/pages/overclocked-launch

  By jakebasile 4 hours ago

• On the plus side, PC gaming hardware seems to last ages now. I built my gaming desktop in 2020, I had a look lately at what a reasonable modern mid tier setup is and they are still recommending a lot of the parts I have. So I'll probably keep using it all for another 5 years then.

  By Gigachad 2 hours ago

• But your stuff from 2020 probably isn't AI "enhanced"!! Throw it in the garbage!

  By brokenmachine an hour ago

• Woah, that book is cool; and so much more from this publisher!

  By m-hodges 4 hours ago

• You ain't kidding! What a treasure trove of a publisher. Never heard of them before, great rec

  By soupfordummies 2 hours ago

• Sound cards too. The Hercules website still proudly shows all their boxes from back when sound cards were popular for gaming and more: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-soundcards-en/
  Several models don't even have pictures of the card, but every one of them shows the crazy box.
  They also still list all their old GPUs. Compare the wild boxes at the top with the TV tuner boxes at the bottom: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-videocards-en/

  By jzwinck an hour ago

• Nvidia also had really cool demo programs you'd run with each generation to show off what your new card could do. [0]
  You'll have to use the Internet archive to see them all. [1] Several, like 'Dawn' for example, were quietly removed in 2020.
  [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/
  [1] http://web.archive.org/web/2019/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us...

  By edgineer an hour ago

• You can watch them on youtube also: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DfWSJvKFMPE

  By cuu508 an hour ago

• That's nice, but they were interactive - You could move around the scene or change the camera angles. The fact that you could do this and prove it was realtime and not prerendered was part of the demo and most of the charm. Lacking that, it's just... lacking.

  By GauntletWizard 34 minutes ago

• Besides the box art, I miss the days when 1) the graphics card didn't cost more than the rest of the components put together, 2) the graphics card got all of its damn power through the connector itself, and 3) MSRP meant something.

  By vinkelhake an hour ago

• 4) scalpers only existed for sports and music venues

  By Biganon 3 minutes ago

• Crazy, outrageous graphics on a graphics accelerator box seems quite fitting. Of course these days they do far more than just render 3D graphics (and that which they do has become quite common), so perhaps that also reflects the shift away from this branding.

  By userbinator 33 minutes ago

• I would guess part of the reason for this was box art used to matter because most of these cards were sold through dedicated electronics retailers like Fry's Electronics, Microcenter, and CompUSA. There was basically no such thing as online ordering for this sort of thing. People were physically browsing goods on shelves.

  By abtinf 3 hours ago

• Just chiming in here, but at least two of the generations of cards there are from ~2005-2008 and we old farts definitely bought (or convinced our parents to buy) things from Newegg at the time!

  By MoOmer 3 hours ago

• 100%. Used Newegg and Tigerdirect a bunch during that period. Shipping took forever.

  By nunez 2 hours ago

• On nowadays gaming related unhinged designs, I raise the CoolMaster Shark X PC case to your attention:
  https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/shark-x/

  By makeitdouble 2 hours ago

• Unusual designs are still a thing in some markets (mainly china) - for example, a cat themed cooler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGGKaX1D9Zo and various anime themed backplates on cards are available from Yeston: https://yestonstore.com/collections/graphics-card

  By zdw 3 hours ago

• Thanks, Japan is in the same boat.
  From full cases [0] including the CPU cooler in general, to themed components[1], when it comes to gaming makers are going beyond and above to create cool visuals.
  [0] https://www.dospara.co.jp/gamepc/kuzuha.html
  [1] https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001009108157/

  By makeitdouble 2 hours ago

• The ones in the article are boxes only, the actual cards were different from what were represented on the box. Anime-themed products are products themselves in various themes. I'd argue that these two are different phenomena.

  By numpad0 2 hours ago

• That's fantastic. I recently bought a Lofree mechanical keyboard (they're a Chinese brand) and they definitely have the most unusual hardware designs I've ever seen.
  Here's one of their mice: https://www.lofree.co/products/lofree-petal-mouse

  By dlivingston 3 hours ago

• It's nice to see, but the design feels like it's meant to go into a clear case so that it can be streamed for the world to see.

  By Larrikin 2 hours ago

• Please stop reminding me of how soulless and watered down everything has become :(
  Games are no different, in Morrowind gods ripped each other's penises off and used them as spears; in Skyrim you fight dragons.

  By Mawr 3 hours ago

• For sure, games have gotten bland and lame. But in an era of quirky games Morrowind was still extra quirky.

  By bee_rider 3 hours ago

• I loved the weird boxes back in the 90s and 2000s. I remember dad would always take us to computer trade shows and ham events, and occasionally you'd see someone from ATi or Nvidia (or one of the integrators) demoing their wares with all sorts of bizarre and funny demo software and renders. I don't know if it was just me or what, but they always sent real nice sales or marketing people and it was fun to talk to them about the GPUs as a kid. I think they were as mystified (I recall several of them laughing about it) about the box art as everyone else was.

  By rpcope1 2 hours ago

• This is a blast from the past! I remember being really young and buying a GPU based solely on what art was on the box (and yes, it was a scantily clad woman) and getting really, really luckily that it actually worked with my components but it was my intro to upgrading PCs!

  By lethologica 4 hours ago

• TFA calls it unhinged, I call it creative and exciting. Now all we get is rounded edges, solid colours, and "copies of reality" - boring; if I wanted reality I'd go outside and touch grass.

  By mmsc 32 minutes ago

• The Voodoo range had some cool boxes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/yp5qzo/3dfx_v...

  By kristianp 3 hours ago

• Ahhh reminded me of my sapphire 3870 toxic edition. Cool box art and one of the coldest running cards I’ve owned with the Vapor x chamber.

  By aunty_helen 2 hours ago

• When people still bought Graphics Processing Units for processing graphics and not crypto mining or AI inferencing

  By ulfw 3 hours ago

• I remember some of those.

  By tcherasaro 3 hours ago

• oh god some of these just brought back memories long repressed

  By dkh 3 hours ago

• Those box designers appear to have moved on to the performance whey protein and workout supplement industry.

  By Mountain_Skies 4 hours ago

• When you'd first get a 3d accelerator you'd enter in a completely new world, the graphics and speed you'd get were on a different planet with what your computer could do without them.
  I think that the boxes initially reflected that.
  My first accelerator (rather late) was that 3D Blaster Voodoo 2; the graphics of the box contributed to the emotion of holding it, they looked better than in the picture.
  I was mindblown when I saw what the card could do, and I believe to have thought that the graphics did reflect well its capabilities.
  I sure kept the box for many years.
  I imagine that then the manufacturers felt compelled to keep making boxes which would stand out; and in part, yes, they tried to attract some purchases from people who didn't originally mean to get a new graphics card.

  By g-b-r 2 hours ago

• look at the evolution of the DirectX branding through the years as well. OGs remember the logo themed after the radioactive hazard symbol.

  By nice_byte 4 hours ago

• Link because I had to look it up to remember: https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/DirectX

  By cruffle_duffle 3 hours ago

• dxdiag.exe

  By ComputerGuru 3 hours ago

• As usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun. Not to mention all the pretending money-seekers who can't code their way out of a paper bag.

  By booleandilemma 4 hours ago

• > As usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun.
  A reminder: Even years after inventing CUDA, Nvidia, the top GPU manufacturer, was fighting for survival. I'm not sure what saved them - perhaps crypto.
  If you ignore the money, they appeared quite strong. But they struggled financially. Intel famously considered buying them around 2010 because they knew they could buy them cheap - Nvidia might not survive and weren't in a position to negotiate). Thankfully, the Intel CEO killed the idea because he knew Jensen wouldn't work well with Intel.
  Nvidia may not have been saved by "bean counters", but they do have a place in the world.

  By BeetleB 3 hours ago

• soul

  By neko_ranger 3 hours ago

• > you could say they were unhinged
  > GPU makers have all abandoned this practice, which is a shame as it provided something different through box art alone. Now, we're drowning in bland boxes and similar-looking graphics cards
  I feel like there could be a more positive adjective than “unhinged” if you're going to turn around and praise it. OED sez “wildly irrational and out of touch with reality”. How about “whimsical”? I love this stuff and think we need to bring this kind of whimsy back to computing.
  > There's a scantily dressed lady in armor
  Author neglects to mention that ATi/AMD had a named ongoing marketing character for many many years — Ruby!
  - Agent Ruby Demo Compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUAuj0Jn8UI
  - 2008 Ruby demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0
  - Ruby origin story https://web.archive.org/web/20071023192128/http://game.amd.c...
  - ATI Agent Ruby™ Usage Guidelines 1.0 http://www.barbaraburch.com/portfolio/whitepaper6.pdf
  - She even stuck around long enough for the ATi name to entirely disappear from AMD Radeon branding: https://i.imgur.com/uBWfzCA.jpeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwIMHX7rW8Q (2013)
  - AMD-exclusive Ruby skin for Quake Champions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LRSqC9n0Tc (2017)
  > GeForce 6600 GT was enclosed inside a box featuring a lovely lady
  nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ had several named demo characters too, but they removed all the pretty lady ones some time in 2020. Compare:
  - https://web.archive.org/web/20200921115422/https://www.nvidi...
  - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/
  Adam Sessler voice I give this article a two… out of five.

  By Lammy 3 hours ago

• I think what happened is, at the time those were literally more or less examples of the best scenes the cards could render. Nowadays, putting together an example of the best scene the card could render requires a whole art department and a couple months of design. Nobody’s going to spend months on box art, so we get bland rectangles or whatever.

  By bee_rider 3 hours ago

• It's nothing that complicated. Nvidia started micromanaging their distributors, and removed all the fun, and AMD just copies what they do.

  By dlcarrier 3 hours ago

• Or it was just a fad when the scene was novel and it ran its course as fads and design elements do. This explanation doesn't require there to be an enemy to demonize but sometimes there just isn't, as much as we might want there to be.

  By gdulli 2 hours ago

• What the best scene you could render is a bit fuzzy. In blender you could render anything at all. But in a game, at what resolution, and what framerate, are the shadows dynamic or baked in?

  By Gigachad 2 hours ago