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
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.
But your stuff from 2020 probably isn't AI "enhanced"!! Throw it in the garbage!
Sounds like a plus to me.
Woah, that book is cool; and so much more from this publisher!
LGR took a look at it on his channel; a very tiny book, with very tiny art, apparently all grabbed from google images. Something of a letdown.
You ain't kidding! What a treasure trove of a publisher. Never heard of them before, great rec
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.
I just bought a RTX 5090 at MSRP. While expensive, it's also a radically more complicated product that plays a more important role in a modern computer than old GPUs did years ago.
Compared to my CPU (9950X3D), it's got a massive monolithic die measuring 750mm2 with over 4x the transistor count of the entire 9950X3d package. Beyond the graphics, it's got tensor and RT cores, dedicated engines for video decode/encode, and 32GB of DDR7 on the board.
Even basic integrated GPUs these days have far surpassed GPUs like the RTX 970, so you can get a very cheap GPU that gets power through the CPU socket, at MSRP.
4) scalpers only existed for sports and music venues
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.
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!
100%. Used Newegg and Tigerdirect a bunch during that period. Shipping took forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For sure, games have gotten bland and lame. But in an era of quirky games Morrowind was still extra quirky.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
When people still bought Graphics Processing Units for processing graphics and not crypto mining or AI inferencing
I remember some of those.
oh god some of these just brought back memories long repressed
Those box designers appear to have moved on to the performance whey protein and workout supplement industry.
look at the evolution of the DirectX branding through the years as well. OGs remember the logo themed after the radioactive hazard symbol.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's nothing that complicated. Nvidia started micromanaging their distributors, and removed all the fun, and AMD just copies what they do.
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.
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?
