NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTX 20 Years of a Legend Unboxing Simulator Brings 2006 Back to Steam

Steam added a free download this morning, that lets anyone with the right hardware open a cardboard box, pull out a GeForce 8800 GTX, and slide the card into a tower that boots Windows Vista. Unreal Engine artist Dylan Browne built the experience with help from Nvidia, three days before the card’s actual twentieth anniversary.

Players walk into a room built to match the hardware and clutter of that year, complete with CRT monitors, unsleeved yellow-and-black cables, and shelves of period magazines. The whole scene runs on path tracing, DLSS 4.5 with ray reconstruction, dynamic multi-frame generation, and RTX mega geometry, so the plastic, metal, and foam look sharp enough to catch light the way real parts did when they first arrived.

Opening the box is a little difficult because you have to click a few times to get the lid off, but once it is open, the padded insert slides easily out and you can begin having a good hard look at the card from all angles. Browne also added the option to remove the cooler so you could see behind the hood at the circuit board and chips underneath, which is really handy. When you finally get the card in and the machine boots up, Windows Vista whirs to life with that familiar startup chime, and just in case you needed reminding, the demo then launches into a short, non-interactive sequence that fires up Crysis for a quick look at some jungle action, as well as all the nice reflections sliding across the nearby disc cases and plastic boxes.

If you look around the room, you’ll notice the rest of the ancient NVIDIA collection, including a Riva TNT2, a GeForce 2, and a GeForce 6800 Ultra, as well as a nForce 680i motherboard and posters of old NVIDIA tech demos like Froggy, Cascades, and Adrianne on the walls. The rest of the room is filled with old magazines, a cruddy old beige keyboard, floppy disks, and a PC mag cover CD with Quake 3 Arena on it.

The system requirements are rather basic, with a GeForce RTX 4070 as the bare minimum and an RTX 5080 as the recommended spec, as well as 32 GB of system memory and approximately 30 GB of free space for the demo. The Game Ready driver must be 621.12 or higher, and for some reason, NVIDIA has only listed their own GPUs; a GeForce NOW version for Ultimate subscribers is expected later.

I should emphasize that the original 8800 GTX was released on November 8, 2006, and had 128 unified stream processors, 768 megabytes of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus, and CUDA for the first time on a GeForce GPU. Crysis, BioShock, and Company of Heroes were some of the big hitters at the time, and it was all because to the unified shader design, which allowed the same cores to handle both pixel and vertex work, eliminating the need for separate fixed chipsets.

Browne created another NVIDIA Unreal Engine project, Through the Ages, which was released around the time of the RTX 5090. Interaction in this new demo can feel cumbersome at times, because after the card is attached, you can only probe about for a while. What you’re left with is a neat little room and the opportunity to hunt for the tiny little details Browne hid here and there, a very cool little Easter egg hunt. The actual download size is 14.6 gigabytes. If you still have a system from 2006 or simply want to check how beautiful path-traced lighting looks on an ancient dual-slot cooler and a stack of PC mags, the free entry on Steam awaits you.