Forum LEVEL

Today, most GPUs come in cool, stylish, minimalist packaging. Slipping my RTX 2080 Super out of its monolithic box felt like opening some prestige electronics product. But it wasn't always like this. Back through the mists of time, in the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, GPU and 3D accelerator packaging was its own nightmarish artform. Here are some examples of the best, or worst, depending on your perspective.

The Winamp Skin Museum is a project by Jordan Eldredge, who, along with the Internet Archive's Jason Scott, collected tens of thousands of skins to preserve on the Internet Archive. That wasn't a great interface for just casually browsing thousands of skins, though, so he built something better.

CRT filters have been around for years, but this one, created by Mattias Gustavsson, is the first really good one I've seen for DOSBox. Better yet, Gustavsson has hacked his filter into a modified version of DOSBox, meaning you don't have to mess around with any settings; you can just download it and play. It comes bundled with a few DOS game demos to show off the filter, but you can hit Ctrl+X to bring up a prompt and run your own games.

"This is just a slightly modified version of the standard DOSBox emulator," writes Gustavsson. "I have just hacked in my own shader which emulates some aspects of old CRT monitors, as I prefer to play emulated games with such a filter, and the built-in DOSBox filters are not to my taste." The filter adds scanlines, subtle chromatic aberration, and a slight curve to the image, which does a very good job of simulating the look of an old PC monitor.

Korean YouTuber and Dark Souls enthusiast, ornstein6990, recently uploaded two separate video tours through 30-years of Nvidia and AMD (plus ATI) hardware history (via Techspot). The private collection is beautifully displayed, with every GPU accompanied by a little plaque listing the card's name, architecture, and release year.

Almost every flagship card is here, from Nvidia's very first GPU, the NV1 from 1995, to a non-functional display unit of the RTX 5090 is here (though they say they hope to one day replace this with one that works). Though Voodoo doesn't even get so much as a look in, it's still a more up to date collection than our very own timeline of game-changing GPUs.

Ornstein6990 also shared their collection with Reddit, claiming that "about two-thirds" of the displayed cards are still operational. Everything was bought second-hand, with the Redditor claiming that the total they spent on the entire collection "definitely doesn’t reach $10,000." The most expensive card, however, was the aforementioned NV1.