The Direct3D team office has an interesting wall with all of their GPU history. The entire hallway of the office is now decorated with the GPUs used for testing purposes. Since it’s the office of Direct3D, there must obviously be hundreds of graphics cards dumped in the storeroom. They need different graphics cards to test on which eventually turn into the junk. Instead of stocking it in a storeroom, team Direct 3D decided to paste them all on the hallway wall.
Office Wall of Direct3D Team
So, the hallway now has turned into a museum of the GPU history. There are 402 GPUs pasted on the walls which showcase 35 years of PC gaming history. The plain hallway wall is now an interesting wall which has some rare breakthrough units, some mainstream success units as well as some obscure GPUs.
Isn’t it a brilliant idea to recycle the hardware which otherwise would have been dumped in some corner of the office? The breakthrough units now hanging on the wall include IBM’s Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) which was IBM’s first graphics card introduced in 1981 and it was also the first colored card for PC.
Other cards include a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush chipset, iconic ATI Radeon9800 pro, Matrox G400, The NVIDIA GeForce 256- the first to offer hardware transfer and lighting, Matrox G400, PowerVR yro1, Intel i740 and many more. Voodoo cards had their own importance in that era. It was the time when very few people had a 3D accelerator card, so the Voodoo cards supported many games.
Every important unit is hung with a label which has the detailed information attached to it, same as we see in the museums.
The team has posted the images of these cards on the blog post, but the images are quite unclear and blur. The tech nerds might be a bit disappointed to see these blur images, but it is still an amazing idea to pay respect to some great and rare cards. See if you are lucky someday to visit the Direct3D office and witness these glorious walls of GPU.
Head over to the official blog post to check what all cards are glorifying the walls of Direct3D office.