Direct3D team office has a Wall of GPU History

Shawn Hargreaves

January 7th, 20192 0

When you are the team behind something like Direct3D, you need many different graphics cards to test on. And when you’ve been doing this for as long as we have, you’ll inevitably accumulate a LOT of cards left over from years gone by. What to do with them all? One option would be to store boxes in someone’s office:

But it occurred to us that a better solution would be to turn one of our office hallways into a museum of GPU history:

402 different GPUs covering 35 years of hardware history later:

Our collection includes mainstream successes, influential breakthrough products, and also many more obscure cards that nevertheless bring back rich memories for those who worked on them.

It only covers discrete GPU configurations, because mobile parts and SoC components are less suitable for hanging on a wall 🙂 We think it’s pretty cool – check it out if you ever have a reason to visit the D3D team in person!