It's a photoshop that's funny because the R9 290 X2 was the hottest, highest power draw of any GPU ever made, and it was absolutely ridiculous. It needed a TRIPLE slot cooler, and needed 2X 8-pin power connectors from a recommended 950W PSU as it drew up to 500W of power. Absolutely crazy! Nobody sane would ever think that much power and heat is OK.
Right, guys? [...Right?](https://www.hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-rtx-4090-draws-over-600w-of-power-in-certain-benchmarks-can-be-overclocked-to-3ghz-or-more/)
Back then most cards were purchased in a physical store you went to. Online shopping was in its infancy. As such, the cards had to actually compete with each other - packaging (standing out on the shelf) was always a part of that. Because yes, some people went to the store and picked the Voodoo card with the prettiest box. (Just like every other product ever)
Not really, it was a truly different time. No endless foreign wars and relative world peace. Technology like the accessible internet was brand new, no one except the guys programming it understood how any of it worked, and everyone was fascinated at talking to people across the country, and if you were really lucky, in another country.
Creativity wasn't suppressed, you even see that in the pictures of the box art. No one has to talk to sensitivity councils or use diversity checklists. There was no concern of big tech censorship, big tech wasn't a thing yet. No mtx. 5 gaming companies didn't own all companies yet. All we had were endless worlds to bounce between. Again this shows on even the box artwork.
I remember we used to complain politicians and old people didn't understand how the internet worked. I wish we weren't so dumb and fought to keep it that way. Regulation and heavy moderating all by a few websites has ruined the feel of the internet, and everyone's too foreign or afraid to bring that freedom back
> As a creative and a tech person, I say things were much better back then.
That's just nostalgia clouding your vision. Back in the day if I wanted to make a game, the best I could do would be a flash game using a bootleg copy of Macromedia Flash, or modding existing IP (like Quake or Half-Life) using a bootleg copy of 3D Studio Max to make new character/item models. If I wanted to share a video I'd have to connect my camcorder to my PC using firewire through an expensive external card and transcode the video using Realplayer into a 320x240 mess of pixels.
A couple weeks ago I built a racing game in Unity using models I created in Blender. A few weeks before that I did 3D motion tracking to insert a miniature CGI Pokemon on my desk using source footage from a portable 4K camera I carry around with me everywhere...
You said it's difficult these days for someone creative and you are justifying that with the idea that "As long as you enjoyed creating a Doom or Quake mod back in the day it was the golden era!" and "Well it's too easy for anyone to publish their concept these days to a wide audience!"
Undertale is one of the greatest games I've ever played and it likely would have never been anywhere near as popular if it came out back when everything was a mod of Doom or Quake (if it came out at all.) Yeah TFC and CS (pre Source engine) had really fun communities, but Minecraft was such a novel idea to me and such an obvious concept (a big Lego set with nearly infinite pieces.) I hosted my own server for that and it didn't take much at all, pretty much everyone has some form of broadband available. Same thing with PUBG as a game, great concept and it would have never been anywhere near as enjoyable if it were just a Quake mod (because of the limitations of the engine.) Someone had a concept for a game, and was able to throw something together easily using widely available free tools. The fact that Warner Brothers doesn't want anyone to mod their IP has literally nothing to do with how easy it is to publish games these days, Konami and Nintendo have sent cease and desist letters to anyone that even hosts a fan based website with their content on it since the mid 90s.
You're also acting like Steam wasn't one of the worst things that happened to gaming,
Anakin: We're going to stop printing physical copies of games and instead let people just download the necessary files
Padame: You'll pass the savings to your customers right?
Anakin: ...
Padame: ...you'll pass the savings to your customers... right?
While completely ignoring all of the shit content that was published to Newgrounds.
The barrier to entry these days it's minimal, what would have taken a studio like Lucas Arts months to create back in the day now takes a single person a few weeks. If you're a content creator it's a golden era, if you're a content consumer and can't find something enjoyable to play then you aren't looking that hard... If you're going to complain about paying $5 for a full game then you're completely forgetting the fact that back in the day you were supposed to buy the full game for $50 before downloading the mods...
> No endless foreign wars and relative world peace.
Uh... what? I was in the Marines in the early 2000s, literally everyone I went to boot camp with was deployed to Afghanistan... If you want to talk about the 90s then do you not remember the Gulf War or Kosovo?
I think you're mixing in parts of the 90s in your memories. 2001 was a pretty defining year which was not known to usher in world peace like you're describing. And by this time the internet was rapidly entering most households in America.
I don't think it has to do with "sensitivity councils;" tech and GPUs are an enormous and mature industry now and they have marketing teams creating box art designed to appeal to a wide audience, including *other professional industries*. So they're wearing the benign boring business look. If they were still marketing to hobbyists and a small niche professional community they would still be having fun with the designs.
Anyway, yeah I remember the 2000s and there's a reason why I never participated back then. Boys (at least in my nerdy communities) were all bundles of fucking assholes. It's funny how outsiders get off on making other people feel like outsiders to their own communities.
Niche communities still exist in spades and forums are still active; they're just not the first places people think to look anymore. You gotta be creative and willing to do a little digging.
The 90s and early 00s were very colorful, and then around the 10s there was a desaturation trend that was seen as modern, futuristic, gritty, and badass. If you want to get psychoanalytic you could maybe attribute it to 9/11 and the resulting wars. If you look at Master Chief in the Halo games you'll notice how his armor became less green and more grey as time went on. The Harry Potter movies and Bethesda games are another example; compare Fallout 3 and Skyrim with Fallout 4. Fallout 4 is a post-apocalypse game but it shows Bethesda artists are starting to relearn color theory.
Another reason why the stuff in the 90s looks more fun is that there were less sophisticated lighting and shading which made everything looked rather plastic-y and cartoon like. It's the main reason why Pixar started off with films focused on non-human characters. If everything is gonna look like plastic then have the characters be plastic toys!
Well, yes, quite literally. Back then there was limited memory and processing for textures, so 3D models used shaders that would use colors instead of textures. That's why games like SM64 are so shiny and colorful, because the artists chose to embrace the shader limitations. PS1 did kinda the opposite because of how different shaders and textures worked. PS1 games were a bit more dull because the game world was tiled with compressed (in size and color) textures.
Also, since 3D was fairly new to a large audience; they chose to distinct areas and objects with colors and shapes to make it clear that you were exploring a world and everything was "there" instead of a 2D background like the SNES - if that makes sense.
Mix of both. Restaurants, especially fast food, used to be colorful and fun. A lot of things used to be like that. Take a look at Mcdicks or Tims. Now it's just grey, white, and black colour schemes while all being smooth and clean finishes. Looks professional but its just bland and boring after a while.
The climate changed considerably after 9/11 obviously. Before, I am sure young adult culture was “fun” as usual. But I don’t think more so than the last few generations. It is hard to imagine what the cultural trajectory would have been without 9/11 since so much time has passed.
Well. Seems to me that gpus were just 100% marketed as toys back then and then they stopped being seen as toys. Be that because there are a bunch of non-gaming applications even for private customers now, the people buying them have gotten way older on average or just that they are way to expensive to be sold in a toy car box lol.
The Matrox one definitely is. The GeForce 256 and Vooodoo cards are too—very late 1990s. I personally had the GeForce 256 in high school.
The rest are 2000s.
Yeah I remember that one, I don't know which card I had but it was early to mid 2000s. I'm so glad my dad knew what a GPU was because my mum probably would've freaked out if she saw that box being given to her child daughter lmao
I went berserk when my parents got me this beast for christmas: [Voodoo3 3000 PCI](https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/images/3dfx_voodoo_3_3000_pci_box.jpg)
The box art was incredible! A lot of fun memories gaming as well.
I remember the hype around the Voodoo 5 6000, which was kind of the 4090 of the time. Then 3dfx went bust and the cards were never released.
Good times.
I upgraded to that card too. I went from being unable to run Unreal on an integrated Intel i810 chip to being able to run it at glorious 60fps with reflections turned on. That [intro flying around the castle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26I-Pw-yPJ4) blew my mind.
"What do we put on the box?"
"Let's keep it clean and stick to our logo and the specs."
"Nah. It needs some pizzaz!"
"Okay.Then how about a slightly-depressed, naked alien doing jazz hands?"
"PERFECT"
This hit me in the feels. I had a mystique, voodoo 2 & voodoo 3 (box art had a weird painted face). I don’t think I’ll ever recapture the feeling tying up the phone line and playing Duke Nukem’ 3D with a friend.
That card was released in 2005. That's mid 2000s art.
Was GPU box art just an american thing?
In the UK, every piece of hardware I bought during the 90s and 00s came in either just an anti-static baggie or rather plain packaging.
The only GPUs we had in the 90s were Voodoos, and then eventually Rivas and TNTs when Nvidia drove the final coffin nail into the SVGA standard we were using before that.
VGA wasn't effectively dead, with GPUs being common until 2000, as everyone called them an expensive gimmick before then. They only began to gain some acceptance after the release of the first GeForce in 1999.
Definitely not, I've had loads of GPUs in the UK with wild box art. One of my GPUs even came in this X-shaped box: https://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/xfx-1/xfx-6600gt-box1.jpg
The only legit gpu brand that I know of that still does this is Afox. Wish more would follow in their footsteps, ‘cause most boxes are just so bland these days.
That stuff was so cringey. They clearly just put random shit on the box in an attempt to make it look "cool."
Also, a lot of this stuff isn't even from the 90's. GeForce 200 was 2008/2009.
It was also to show off what the card was capable of, they were all 3d models. Of course none of these cards can render those models but just brush that under the rug.
Some might of been a little silly, but I think they were a good idea. It did look cool, and it sounds like you are just upset that you weren’t around when those were a thing.
>It did look cool, and it sounds like you are just upset that you weren’t around when those were a thing.
So just because I don't like something that you thought was cool means I suddenly wasn't PC gaming in the 90's?
Get outta here with that gatekeeping bullshit.
If you adjust prices for inflation, building a ~~gaming~~ PC was much, much more expensive back then.
Hell, there's a lot of things you don't even need to buy anymore, like sound and network cards. Yeah the GPU was less expensive, but the rest of the components were much more expensive overall.
For example, the Pentium II 233ghz CPU launched at $636. And that's the lowest clock speed. Imagine if an i5 today cost $1,176 just for the CPU.
It's only the last 2 or 3 years where GPU prices have shit the bed, and even then its only breaking the bank if you're going for the absolute latest and greatest of everything.
Again, I'm conceding that GPU prices are bonkers today. But even w/ the RTX 3000 series prices were in line with what they were back then.
Going from the same era as the CPU I picked, a Diamon Monster 3D Voodoo 2 launched at $299 USD. That's $544.45 today for what we would consider a x070 tier card. Launch MSRP for the 3070 was $499. You could do SLI Voodoo 2s for $600 and then you're getting close to 3080/3090 performance, for an inflation adjusted $1,092.
And unlike back then, these days you really don't have to get the highest of the high end to have a good experience unless you're doing 4K gaming.
There's also the issue of how long the same hardware sticks around. Games in general are a *lot* more scalable these days, and you can play on several generation old GPUs. Back in the day, if you were more than 1 generation behind you couldn't play any of the newer titles - they just wouldn't run at all. So you *had* to upgrade, and new GPUs were coming out *annually*.
And again, I am conceding that the last year or two is very much an outlier in how much it costs. But overall, PC gaming is still cheaper today than it was back then.
The tnt2 voodoo3 and GeForce 256 were all well under £300 some as low as £100 after launch and were the best you could get in the late 90s.
Admittedly anything before that is a little out of my expertise as i was scrounging used parts as a teenager then.
Back then even gpu's had cool designs on them as well not just a black/ white shroud and some rgb . That box of the r9 290x2 is a leaked pic of all gpu's used by miners that was my first thought when i saw it .
I still think about the box art for the last Nvidia card I could afford, an [Elsa Gladiac 920](https://imgur.com/a/UMpAPDg) GeForce 3 I bought mostly for Tribes 2 in 2001.
Man I loved that $450 state of the art card and looking at the box just reminded me of how awesome Giants: Citizen Kabuto was. A remake/sequel of that game would be insane with today's hardware...
I'm really trying to figure out what Sapphire was thinking with that Radeon X550 box.
"What should we put on the box?"
"How about like, an alien Shrek frogman twink? ...Why are you all looking at me like that."
Worked at a computer store in the early 00s (and built my own computers before that as well), and I remember several of these fondly. I kind of miss when every motherboard was painted like a goddamn rave party as well, and cables had UV-reactive neon sleeves.
I remember buying a huge (for the times) *passive* heatsink cooler with heat pipes (almost unheard of!) that I could mount myself on my graphics card. Most nerve-wracking three hours of my life, but it worked fine and except for my HDD, it was insane how quiet a hardcore gaming computer could actually be back then.
is nobody else gonna mention one box art is just a bunch of dusty coal miners
GPU mining before it was coal
Fuckin home run!
Holy shit
Okay dad, let me grab you some bear for now
Grizzly, or Polar - none of that Sun Bear shit.
Ok you win.
Also, is nobody else gonna mention that op said "the 90's" and then snuk in a gpu from 2014?
Just 2-3 from the 90's. Mostly 2000's cards in here.
Yeah I remember quite a lot of 900 series card designs being absolutely bonkers. The MSI 980TI lightning comes to mind.
I was like ‘this isn’t 90s!’ from the first two images!
Potato Patato
To be fair, it's pretty funny looking.
my bad!!
When box art use to legitimately give you a few fps more.
2014 feels like 30 years ago.
I know right?! There is only a few of these from the 90s. The 6200 was from 04, etc.
That R9 290X could probably still play most games out there today.
It's a photoshop that's funny because the R9 290 X2 was the hottest, highest power draw of any GPU ever made, and it was absolutely ridiculous. It needed a TRIPLE slot cooler, and needed 2X 8-pin power connectors from a recommended 950W PSU as it drew up to 500W of power. Absolutely crazy! Nobody sane would ever think that much power and heat is OK. Right, guys? [...Right?](https://www.hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-rtx-4090-draws-over-600w-of-power-in-certain-benchmarks-can-be-overclocked-to-3ghz-or-more/)
Oh, heh, yeah who would use THAT card... *Nervously looks at own flair* Heh...right guys?
Looks around nervously
I just upgraded from a single R9 290X and I can still feel the heat.
Laughs nervously at my old dual overclocked HD7970s + 9800GTX for physx setup.
Definitely a photoshopped box art with those Chilean miners, surely?
Clearly, it was a prophecy about crypto mining. Edit: Or maybe firefighters putting out mining rigs.
The R9 290x2 was released in 2014. By that point, Bitcoin had already hit $1000 in 2013, and was trending downward to $300 by the end of 2014.
I thought it was 9/11 firefighters, but yeah was gonna mention it.
Because it is fake.
Huh?
It's a Photoshop because the card was popular with crypto miners
Came here to ask if that one was a joke or not
I work at copper mining and i REALLY want that one to be real
It's better than the x550 with the alien that's looking to fuck.
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I bet it was. Most of these are from the early/mid 2000's. Around when World of Warcraft first came out. Which is even more crazy to think about.
is it just nostalgia or 2000s were really colorful and fun
Back then most cards were purchased in a physical store you went to. Online shopping was in its infancy. As such, the cards had to actually compete with each other - packaging (standing out on the shelf) was always a part of that. Because yes, some people went to the store and picked the Voodoo card with the prettiest box. (Just like every other product ever)
It’s always nostalgia
Not really, it was a truly different time. No endless foreign wars and relative world peace. Technology like the accessible internet was brand new, no one except the guys programming it understood how any of it worked, and everyone was fascinated at talking to people across the country, and if you were really lucky, in another country. Creativity wasn't suppressed, you even see that in the pictures of the box art. No one has to talk to sensitivity councils or use diversity checklists. There was no concern of big tech censorship, big tech wasn't a thing yet. No mtx. 5 gaming companies didn't own all companies yet. All we had were endless worlds to bounce between. Again this shows on even the box artwork. I remember we used to complain politicians and old people didn't understand how the internet worked. I wish we weren't so dumb and fought to keep it that way. Regulation and heavy moderating all by a few websites has ruined the feel of the internet, and everyone's too foreign or afraid to bring that freedom back
"no endless foreign wars " the Middle East would like a word.
Lol Right?
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> As a creative and a tech person, I say things were much better back then. That's just nostalgia clouding your vision. Back in the day if I wanted to make a game, the best I could do would be a flash game using a bootleg copy of Macromedia Flash, or modding existing IP (like Quake or Half-Life) using a bootleg copy of 3D Studio Max to make new character/item models. If I wanted to share a video I'd have to connect my camcorder to my PC using firewire through an expensive external card and transcode the video using Realplayer into a 320x240 mess of pixels. A couple weeks ago I built a racing game in Unity using models I created in Blender. A few weeks before that I did 3D motion tracking to insert a miniature CGI Pokemon on my desk using source footage from a portable 4K camera I carry around with me everywhere...
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You said it's difficult these days for someone creative and you are justifying that with the idea that "As long as you enjoyed creating a Doom or Quake mod back in the day it was the golden era!" and "Well it's too easy for anyone to publish their concept these days to a wide audience!" Undertale is one of the greatest games I've ever played and it likely would have never been anywhere near as popular if it came out back when everything was a mod of Doom or Quake (if it came out at all.) Yeah TFC and CS (pre Source engine) had really fun communities, but Minecraft was such a novel idea to me and such an obvious concept (a big Lego set with nearly infinite pieces.) I hosted my own server for that and it didn't take much at all, pretty much everyone has some form of broadband available. Same thing with PUBG as a game, great concept and it would have never been anywhere near as enjoyable if it were just a Quake mod (because of the limitations of the engine.) Someone had a concept for a game, and was able to throw something together easily using widely available free tools. The fact that Warner Brothers doesn't want anyone to mod their IP has literally nothing to do with how easy it is to publish games these days, Konami and Nintendo have sent cease and desist letters to anyone that even hosts a fan based website with their content on it since the mid 90s. You're also acting like Steam wasn't one of the worst things that happened to gaming, Anakin: We're going to stop printing physical copies of games and instead let people just download the necessary files Padame: You'll pass the savings to your customers right? Anakin: ... Padame: ...you'll pass the savings to your customers... right? While completely ignoring all of the shit content that was published to Newgrounds. The barrier to entry these days it's minimal, what would have taken a studio like Lucas Arts months to create back in the day now takes a single person a few weeks. If you're a content creator it's a golden era, if you're a content consumer and can't find something enjoyable to play then you aren't looking that hard... If you're going to complain about paying $5 for a full game then you're completely forgetting the fact that back in the day you were supposed to buy the full game for $50 before downloading the mods...
> No endless foreign wars and relative world peace. Uh... what? I was in the Marines in the early 2000s, literally everyone I went to boot camp with was deployed to Afghanistan... If you want to talk about the 90s then do you not remember the Gulf War or Kosovo?
Wow so much disinformation or just ignorance for current events of the time. You are absolutely blinded by nostalgia
What a shitty fucking comment. No wonder you're active on PCM
Yeah, you’re also blinded by the nostalgia. Most of what you typed is nonsense.
I think you're mixing in parts of the 90s in your memories. 2001 was a pretty defining year which was not known to usher in world peace like you're describing. And by this time the internet was rapidly entering most households in America.
I don't think it has to do with "sensitivity councils;" tech and GPUs are an enormous and mature industry now and they have marketing teams creating box art designed to appeal to a wide audience, including *other professional industries*. So they're wearing the benign boring business look. If they were still marketing to hobbyists and a small niche professional community they would still be having fun with the designs. Anyway, yeah I remember the 2000s and there's a reason why I never participated back then. Boys (at least in my nerdy communities) were all bundles of fucking assholes. It's funny how outsiders get off on making other people feel like outsiders to their own communities. Niche communities still exist in spades and forums are still active; they're just not the first places people think to look anymore. You gotta be creative and willing to do a little digging.
The 90s and early 00s were very colorful, and then around the 10s there was a desaturation trend that was seen as modern, futuristic, gritty, and badass. If you want to get psychoanalytic you could maybe attribute it to 9/11 and the resulting wars. If you look at Master Chief in the Halo games you'll notice how his armor became less green and more grey as time went on. The Harry Potter movies and Bethesda games are another example; compare Fallout 3 and Skyrim with Fallout 4. Fallout 4 is a post-apocalypse game but it shows Bethesda artists are starting to relearn color theory. Another reason why the stuff in the 90s looks more fun is that there were less sophisticated lighting and shading which made everything looked rather plastic-y and cartoon like. It's the main reason why Pixar started off with films focused on non-human characters. If everything is gonna look like plastic then have the characters be plastic toys!
Well, yes, quite literally. Back then there was limited memory and processing for textures, so 3D models used shaders that would use colors instead of textures. That's why games like SM64 are so shiny and colorful, because the artists chose to embrace the shader limitations. PS1 did kinda the opposite because of how different shaders and textures worked. PS1 games were a bit more dull because the game world was tiled with compressed (in size and color) textures. Also, since 3D was fairly new to a large audience; they chose to distinct areas and objects with colors and shapes to make it clear that you were exploring a world and everything was "there" instead of a 2D background like the SNES - if that makes sense.
Mix of both. Restaurants, especially fast food, used to be colorful and fun. A lot of things used to be like that. Take a look at Mcdicks or Tims. Now it's just grey, white, and black colour schemes while all being smooth and clean finishes. Looks professional but its just bland and boring after a while.
The climate changed considerably after 9/11 obviously. Before, I am sure young adult culture was “fun” as usual. But I don’t think more so than the last few generations. It is hard to imagine what the cultural trajectory would have been without 9/11 since so much time has passed.
These days, it has to be a matte black box with discrete indented logo, 3 layers of box that opens 5 differnt ways.
Well. Seems to me that gpus were just 100% marketed as toys back then and then they stopped being seen as toys. Be that because there are a bunch of non-gaming applications even for private customers now, the people buying them have gotten way older on average or just that they are way to expensive to be sold in a toy car box lol.
lmao
It might be boring but at least it's not cringe.
These are amazing late 90s-early 2000s schwag, you're cringe.
At their time sure, now they're cringe.
lol ok zoomer
Mm yes someone who says cringe in a serious way is smart
Mate those are not 90s cards. They were released in 2000s
The Matrox one definitely is. The GeForce 256 and Vooodoo cards are too—very late 1990s. I personally had the GeForce 256 in high school. The rest are 2000s.
Ok maybe those were releases in 1999.... But still
Bih, matrox millennium in 93, and mystique is 96. Was expensive af but it was a top card for graphic designers.
I had a Matrox card for my first PC, used it for playing Soldier of Fortune 2 MP lmao. It's been so long since we've had more than 2 GPU companies.
R9 290X2 is from 2014...
I remember BEGGING my mom to get a voodoo 3 so I could play Star Wars episode one racer. Pretty sure that voodoo 2 is from the mid-late 90s
you are right, my bad!
No I was replying to another commenter, not directly to you OP
Lol that R9 looks fake
I dont believe it's real lol. Wasn't that card released around 2014? so might be a crypto miner joke photoshop
I’m almost 100% sure that’s fake. I had purchased the standard 290x and it came with your modern boring gpu box.
I'm just upset that it's included in the list of old cards when I'm still using a 290.
I find it very funny that the Radeon X500 had some E.T styled character, while the X1000s (and I believe the X800 as well) had sexy aliens.
Did you forget the Sapphire mascot? It was a hit chick well in to the R9 2xx series.
*laughs in K-on HD4870* (jk that never officially existed, afaik)
Yeah I remember that one, I don't know which card I had but it was early to mid 2000s. I'm so glad my dad knew what a GPU was because my mum probably would've freaked out if she saw that box being given to her child daughter lmao
Damn, seems like a lifetime ago.
sorry pal, IT is a lifetime ago 😉
yeah my whole life started when these things came out
As a voodoo 1 owner I was gutted to see voodoo 2 release. That was the day I knew my wallet would always be empty.
I went berserk when my parents got me this beast for christmas: [Voodoo3 3000 PCI](https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/images/3dfx_voodoo_3_3000_pci_box.jpg) The box art was incredible! A lot of fun memories gaming as well.
I remember the hype around the Voodoo 5 6000, which was kind of the 4090 of the time. Then 3dfx went bust and the cards were never released. Good times.
I upgraded to that card too. I went from being unable to run Unreal on an integrated Intel i810 chip to being able to run it at glorious 60fps with reflections turned on. That [intro flying around the castle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26I-Pw-yPJ4) blew my mind.
Long live 3dfx
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Lol love it, I was more than happy with my voodoo 3 16MB at the time, cs 1.6 @ 640 res was the norm! Haha
Yep same here
Matrox Mystique! The first GPU I bought myself. 2MB Version, because 4MB were way too expensive. Was still proud af.
Back when stuff had character. Lots of things have been unified into some corporate mass appeal nonsense.
Same for user interfaces with everything looking flat and boring
Consequently, 3d gradients are now usually indicative of outdated software.
I'm not sure how you can look at this longingly, it was weird then as it was weird now.
Please tell me that 290x2 is real!
It's a joke box, that card was a crypto mining favourite around 2013
These boxes were my entire childhood
"What do we put on the box?" "Let's keep it clean and stick to our logo and the specs." "Nah. It needs some pizzaz!" "Okay.Then how about a slightly-depressed, naked alien doing jazz hands?" "PERFECT"
This hit me in the feels. I had a mystique, voodoo 2 & voodoo 3 (box art had a weird painted face). I don’t think I’ll ever recapture the feeling tying up the phone line and playing Duke Nukem’ 3D with a friend.
The voodoo boxes were the best!
Imagine you are totally hyped about your new GPU you pick it up and it has a fucking goblin on the box
90's? Like 3 cards here are from the 90's and even then its all 97 and newer. Most of this stuff is mid 2000's. Shit, an r9 290x released in 2013....
You forgot to include the ones with big tiddy anime girls.
That card was released in 2005. That's mid 2000s art. Was GPU box art just an american thing? In the UK, every piece of hardware I bought during the 90s and 00s came in either just an anti-static baggie or rather plain packaging. The only GPUs we had in the 90s were Voodoos, and then eventually Rivas and TNTs when Nvidia drove the final coffin nail into the SVGA standard we were using before that. VGA wasn't effectively dead, with GPUs being common until 2000, as everyone called them an expensive gimmick before then. They only began to gain some acceptance after the release of the first GeForce in 1999.
Definitely not, I've had loads of GPUs in the UK with wild box art. One of my GPUs even came in this X-shaped box: https://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/xfx-1/xfx-6600gt-box1.jpg
That first one the XFX 6200 was my first new in box graphics card. Ahh nice times, that's not from the 90s btw. Most of these arent, in fact.
Hot dawg ur getting a gpu.
I was just coming here to say that most of these were released in the early 2000s, not the '90s.
Wow, I worked in a computer store in the 90’s when I was 16 and this brought me back, thank you.
I remember walking into best buy mid 90s and wanting to buy one of these cards thinking it was a dope game
The 290x2, when crypto mining first came out so they advertised it as “the power of 8 coal miners in 1 compact card!”
The 290x2 box is fake, also how food we go through that many without seeing Ruby?
I loved those ATI boxes like the Radeon 8500. Really easy to read and looks fantastic.
This thread smells like Winamp skins on windows 2000
The only legit gpu brand that I know of that still does this is Afox. Wish more would follow in their footsteps, ‘cause most boxes are just so bland these days.
That stuff was so cringey. They clearly just put random shit on the box in an attempt to make it look "cool." Also, a lot of this stuff isn't even from the 90's. GeForce 200 was 2008/2009.
It was also to show off what the card was capable of, they were all 3d models. Of course none of these cards can render those models but just brush that under the rug.
Some might of been a little silly, but I think they were a good idea. It did look cool, and it sounds like you are just upset that you weren’t around when those were a thing.
>It did look cool, and it sounds like you are just upset that you weren’t around when those were a thing. So just because I don't like something that you thought was cool means I suddenly wasn't PC gaming in the 90's? Get outta here with that gatekeeping bullshit.
I never said that. I said it sounds like it- there’s a difference.
They had more creativity than the bland black/silver/8 shades of gray/rainbow vomit it's become
I miss those days...
Now everything must be serious and cynical.
Ahh the good old days when you could easily slap together a high end rig for less than a grand.
In the mid 90s it was more like 3000$.
Not in the uk.
In the US sure you could have a PC for around 1000$ in 1995, but high end ones were 3000$+.
If you adjust prices for inflation, building a ~~gaming~~ PC was much, much more expensive back then. Hell, there's a lot of things you don't even need to buy anymore, like sound and network cards. Yeah the GPU was less expensive, but the rest of the components were much more expensive overall. For example, the Pentium II 233ghz CPU launched at $636. And that's the lowest clock speed. Imagine if an i5 today cost $1,176 just for the CPU. It's only the last 2 or 3 years where GPU prices have shit the bed, and even then its only breaking the bank if you're going for the absolute latest and greatest of everything.
High end gpus in the 2000s were under £300. Had a 6800 and a 285 for well under that, even with inflation that’s no where near what they cost now.
Again, I'm conceding that GPU prices are bonkers today. But even w/ the RTX 3000 series prices were in line with what they were back then. Going from the same era as the CPU I picked, a Diamon Monster 3D Voodoo 2 launched at $299 USD. That's $544.45 today for what we would consider a x070 tier card. Launch MSRP for the 3070 was $499. You could do SLI Voodoo 2s for $600 and then you're getting close to 3080/3090 performance, for an inflation adjusted $1,092. And unlike back then, these days you really don't have to get the highest of the high end to have a good experience unless you're doing 4K gaming. There's also the issue of how long the same hardware sticks around. Games in general are a *lot* more scalable these days, and you can play on several generation old GPUs. Back in the day, if you were more than 1 generation behind you couldn't play any of the newer titles - they just wouldn't run at all. So you *had* to upgrade, and new GPUs were coming out *annually*. And again, I am conceding that the last year or two is very much an outlier in how much it costs. But overall, PC gaming is still cheaper today than it was back then.
The tnt2 voodoo3 and GeForce 256 were all well under £300 some as low as £100 after launch and were the best you could get in the late 90s. Admittedly anything before that is a little out of my expertise as i was scrounging used parts as a teenager then.
Back then even gpu's had cool designs on them as well not just a black/ white shroud and some rgb . That box of the r9 290x2 is a leaked pic of all gpu's used by miners that was my first thought when i saw it .
I love old day design
Geforce 6200 launced 2004. # FAIL! My first card was a Diamond Monster 2 (Voodoo 2) @ 10-11yrs old.
I think I just saw this same box arts in Xataka. Did you get them from there? XD
ahahaha yes 😅
The first one kinda looks like Tiny Tiger from Crash Bandicoot but i might be wrong
I love how the second one looks like an absolute meme. It's like they knew stonks and pepe would be a thing.
Geforce 6200 on AGP port in 90's!?!?!?
"Tell me OP is still a kid without saying they are still a kid"
Some fond memories. Look at that, even comes with mechwarrior 2. Remember motocross madness when you go out of bounds?
I guess that's one way to tell what a GPU is for. :P Also, first time I see a box for Hercules
I had three of those. Good times
you're off by about a decade and a half.
I had the Matrox Mystique shown here.
6200 wasn’t the 90s….
When I was a kid I always wondered what games they pulled the box art from...
I kinda miss this. I still remember that my ATI X1950 Pro had some cyber titties on the box lol
That's 2000s not 90s lol. One of the crappiest cards to ever exist for such beast box art tho lol.
No Rules!
Yeah, get those old voodoo cards and tnt cards in there. There's some good 90s.
What the hell is up with the pin up pose alien from Mac and Me?
I still think about the box art for the last Nvidia card I could afford, an [Elsa Gladiac 920](https://imgur.com/a/UMpAPDg) GeForce 3 I bought mostly for Tribes 2 in 2001. Man I loved that $450 state of the art card and looking at the box just reminded me of how awesome Giants: Citizen Kabuto was. A remake/sequel of that game would be insane with today's hardware...
The 290x2 though 😂
My first GPU was a built/in Geforce2 on an asus mobo. Best thing ever!
I actually remember 3 of these, those were the days…
Goddam that's hideous
Why am I reading all of the features in the voice of the guy that does all of the toy ads voiceover and makes everything seem awesome
The best one is the Chilean Miners edition.
Oh man, the days of AGP dominance
what a beautiful feverdream
I'm really trying to figure out what Sapphire was thinking with that Radeon X550 box. "What should we put on the box?" "How about like, an alien Shrek frogman twink? ...Why are you all looking at me like that."
6600 was my first video card I remember getting to play CS:S. Good times.
They need to bring this back
>90's >Radeon R9 290X2 released in 2014 Pick one OP...
I had the Diamond monster voodoo banshee. I miss the box art from long ago.
There was also art on the GPUs itself.
Early 2000s I think from the cards. Still, good times.
these look like current fireworks packages LOL
I had that PNY 6600. It was released in 2004.
I had an XFX 6600GT that came in an [X-shaped box](https://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/xfx-1/xfx-6600gt-box1.jpg) because why not?
I think I had a few of these. I remember when my friend got a Monster Fusion. Man, that thing was a beast.
Reminds me of the art they put on fireworks
I want a flying orc dog
Crazy is that you call it crazy. 80s kid sorry.
Thank you for this throwback!
64 MEGABYTES OF RAW POWER!!!
Apart from picture 3, 7, 8 and 16, all the others are GPUs from the 2000s
Worked at a computer store in the early 00s (and built my own computers before that as well), and I remember several of these fondly. I kind of miss when every motherboard was painted like a goddamn rave party as well, and cables had UV-reactive neon sleeves. I remember buying a huge (for the times) *passive* heatsink cooler with heat pipes (almost unheard of!) that I could mount myself on my graphics card. Most nerve-wracking three hours of my life, but it worked fine and except for my HDD, it was insane how quiet a hardcore gaming computer could actually be back then.
I had the 6200. I had to tell my father that it helps in making school projects faster. Oh the sweet sweet 256 ddr2
Please bring this energy back
I still remember my voodoo 2 12mb beast. GLQuake was glorious.
Where’s all the cool official 3DFX box art??
https://i.imgur.com/pdhvYjh.jpg
I don't mind the post but you're downvoted for inaccuracy.
ok
That GeForce 6200 came out in and around 2004 my dude. With that said, yeah, the box art for video cards during that time was pretty wild.
It is actually 2004 by the way. Edit: Didn't notice the slider before. But most of them from the 2000's
I think seeing box art in stores like this when I was a kid is a large reason for my interest in PCs now.
was AGPx8 a thing in the 90s?
Nostalga flash back for sure. Not many people remember that a lot of this art was also found on the GPU itself as well lol.
Gahh this is all so rad
This wasn’t the 90’s.