Collecting hardware is nothing strange, but the best results always come with a little specialization, and that is what the Videocard Virtual Museum does. As its name suggests, its content is entirely focused on graphics cards, some of them quite classic, and others that never reached the general market.
There is no point in denying it: current graphics cards are true beasts. Factors like performance, power consumption, and memory availability have grown notably in recent years, chasing the ultimate visual experience of resolution, framerate, and advanced effects like ray tracing. However, those improvements would not be here without a long and complex process that left many technologies and companies along the way.
Visit the Videocard Virtual Museum
The Videocard Virtual Museum helps us know that past a little better with an excellent collection of classic and odd graphics cards alike. The museum has a search engine with very precise filters that allow us to separate cards by year (between 1982 and 2012), silicon manufacturer, OEM, bus, and platform. Do not know where to start? Do not worry: the Random button is an excellent option. I decided to press it a couple of times here, and I chose these five results.
Evans & Sutherland SimFUSION 6500q
Besides having a legendary name (Evans & Sutherland were true pioneers of computer graphics, and their students founded companies like Silicon Graphics and Pixar), the SimFUSION 6500q stands out for two details. First, it has four ATI Radeon 9800XT chips, long before SLI and CrossFire could support such a configuration. And second, it uses two interfaces at the same time, AGP and PCI. Linus published a video about this card in 2020.
Nvidia GeForce 256
None other than the first graphics chip of the GeForce family, also known by its code name NV10. Depending on the manufacturer, this chip worked with SDR or DDR memory. The "256" comes from the four 64-bit pipelines (64x4=256) present in the NV10, but the most important thing was the transfer of the Transform and Lighting function from the CPU to the GPU. Nvidia's bet took a while to materialize, but time (and the later disappearance of 3dfx) played in its favor.
Matrox G200
Although Matrox has not gone anywhere, its cards were a true object of desire in the '90s. The G200 was essentially Matrox's first serious attempt to incorporate full 3D acceleration into its products for the general market. The Millennium variant used SGRAM memory, while the Mystique kept SDRAM memory. Both could be upgraded from 8 to 16 MB with additional modules, an advantage we definitely miss. Its image quality was extraordinary, but the world wanted more speed...
Trident TVGA9000C
My goal is not to resemble Grandpa Simpson, but in the early '90s there were several companies fighting for a place in the graphics card market, and Trident was one of them. Its TVGA8900 and TVGA9000 chip series were very popular in low-cost computers, with special configurations that could exceed a megabyte of memory, and even take advantage of the virtues of the Vesa Local Bus. Unfortunately, Trident collided with the reality of 3D, but it survived until 2012, the year it declared bankruptcy.
Creative Graphics Blaster CT6710
In the world of graphics cards, OEMs also play a role, and one of them was Creative Labs. That is right, the creator of the Sound Blaster series released various cards using chips from multiple manufacturers. In the image we have the Creative Graphics Blaster, a creature with 16 MB of RAM and AGP interface. The chip is a classic Nvidia Riva TNT NV4, which debuted in 1998 as a response to 3dfx's Voodoo2. Other cards like the Diamond Viper V550 and the STB Velocity 4400 adopted that silicon.
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