HomeHardwareNews
The GPU History Museum needs a lot more graphics card box artI have lots of ideas for a better GPU museum!
I have lots of ideas for a better GPU museum!
Hardware company Colorful announced this week that they are opening “the first GPU history museum” in China, recording and celebrating decades of circuit boards making pictures on your computer. I was excited! My head filled with thoughts of what I’d put into a GPU museum, everything from tech demos to ghastly box art. Then I saw what they put in their GPU museum. Oh. No, this is no fun at all.
Okay but this dismantled card is neat. Not just because I’ll never dare to do that.
What does all that demonstrate, teach, evoke, or capture? It looks mostly like old copper and resin, just products, just stuff. It’s a shame, because I do think the culture which graphics cards fed into and fed off was often fascinating. The games they enabled certainly are. As are the ways they were marketed and puffed up. Their increasing need to create their own relevancy is also wild as hell. Sure, GPUs are hardware, but don’t just treat them as physical objects.
I’d want a giant gallery of graphics card box art. The nineties, noughties, and tensies sold us graphics cards with weird and lurid cyberbabes, robots, monsters, aliens, and technoguff, and I adore it. Just imagine a room with 100 odd graphics card boxes. I was enjoying imagining that, and then I lost an hour looking up old boxes on Amazon.
A handful of the wacky graphics card boxes I now have saved on my hard drive.
‘A New Dawn’ NVIDIA GeForce GTX Tech Demo TrailerWatch on YouTube
‘A New Dawn’ NVIDIA GeForce GTX Tech Demo Trailer
I’d want something which helps me understand, like, anything about how modern cards work. Hardware and rendering technology have become so complicated that it’s all a mystery to me. Any sort of physical exhibit abstractly demonstrating basics of rendering or whatever could be magic. Love an abstract representation of a complicated ephemeral process.
Look, I know Colorful’s museum is a marketing exercise. But it could have been a cool marketing exercise. Ah well. What else would you want in a graphics card museum, gang?
