Travel through graphics card history in Colorful's new GPU museum

Colorful GPU museum featuring GPUs through the years

(Image credit: Colorful)

If you've ever wanted to go back to the early days of graphics cards, when chips were plentiful and boxes plastered in half-baked 3D models, now you can. Graphics card manufacturer Colorful has opened its very own graphics card museum, which perfectly encapsulates how far GPU tech has come in such a short amount of time.

Graphics cards found their footing in the '80s, but it wasn't until the '90s that things really took off. Colorful's new graphics card museum covers the lot: from IBM graphics adapters, the progenitor of modern GPUs and built by engineers such as Mark Dean; to Nvidia's GeForce 256, the first of a long line leading to today's monster cards.

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Colorful's GPU museum display with graphics cards from 2000 to 2021 — (Image credit: Colorful)

The museum also covers Colorful's own launch into the GPU market back in 1999 with its Voodoo 2, and contains relics such as ATI's Rage Fury MAXX, a card that would eventually lead to heaps of dual-GPU ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards. You can even spot a couple of modern rarities, such as the Radeon VII, which has now found a second life as an all-powerful mining machine.

The museum is opened in partnership with Nvidia, too, so there are plenty of the chipset maker's earliest cards lying around.

I'd imagine most on our list of the most important graphics cards in history can be found in those hallowed halls.

The museum will be opened to the public soon, although you'll have to find your way to Shenzhen, China in order to visit.

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.