- Nvidia has a new interactive demo out on Steam
- It offers a virtual unboxing of a GeForce 8800 GTX…
- …but you need an RTX 4070 to run it, and the recommended GPU is an RTX 5080
- Some gamers feel that it's a 'slap in the face' for several reasons
Can't afford a new GPU thanks to the ever-worsening RAM crisis? Well, Nvidia wants to take you back to the days when a graphics card didn't destroy your bank balance, courtesy of a new demo on Steam where you get to unbox and install a GeForce GPU from 2006.
The Verge spotted the interactive demo entitled 'GeForce 8800 GTX — 20 Years of a Legend' which can be grabbed for free on Steam.
It was developed by Dylan Browne, an Unreal Engine artist who was commissioned by Nvidia, and the demo is rendered in Unreal Engine (unsurprisingly). The idea is that you can: "Step into a 2006-era PC gaming room, unbox the GeForce 8800 GTX, inspect it up close, and install it in an era-accurate PC tower."
On the face of it, that's a rather fun idea — and it's smartly implemented to be fair, including revisiting Windows Vista on a CRT monitor — but if you start to think about it more deeply, this exercise seems more than a little tone deaf in the current PC components climate.
Have a watch of Nvidia's illustrative clip below first off, before we move on to discuss this one.
Analysis: ragebait, greed, and a lot of other accusations from gamers
One of the most obvious sticking points here is the requirements to run this demo. What Nvidia GPU will you need to take part in a virtual unboxing? Here's a clue: it certainly won't run on a GeForce 8800 GTX. In fact you'll need an RTX 4070 at the minimum, and the recommended GPU as per the Steam specs is a… wait for it… RTX 5080. (You must have 32GB of RAM, as well, at minimum).
And this comes at a time when the RAM crisis has made that RTX 5080 soar in price to over double its MSRP in the US, and with hefty inflation evident in all countries (over 50% in the UK for example). Don't even start with the RTX 5090, and as we've seen, even lower-end graphics cards are being hit hard with price hikes.
As one Redditor put it neatly (with the swearing removed): "A 5080 for an unboxing simulator. They are just laughing in our faces."
Another in that thread replies to say: "Ragebait? You are not able to afford a real graphics card — here, take this virtual one?"
Speaking of rage, there's quite an outpouring of it in the comments for Nvidia's YouTube video (the one embedded above), such as: "Great job, today consumers have no chance to be able to afford new high end gaming video cards in favor of greed and AI money. A 5090 is $10-15k, and a 5080 is $2k or more — it's a slap in the face to post this tbh."
Nvidia has a clear priority for AI, data centers and profits over consumers and gaming GPUs – and it's a business, that's where the money lies, we get that. Shareholders for-the-win and so forth, but given that, the thoughtlessness of this little PR nugget is pretty staggering really.
What sort of reaction did Nvidia expect it would get? Okay, there are some Redditors reminiscing about the good old days of 2006, and the 8800 GTX that they owned. However, many more are simply bitter (or indeed incandescent) that Nvidia appears to be reminding us of better times, having done a good deal to cause the GPU pricing pain which is now prevalent thanks to chasing AI profits. While asking for a high-end, now ridiculously expensive, Blackwell GPU to run the demo (at the recommended level).
The GeForce 8800 GTX was $599 as a top-end monster GPU when it arrived, and if you want an RTX 5090 these days, you'll pay over 15x that amount. I would think that Nvidia would want to do anything but take a nostalgic trip back to the days of relatively affordable high-end graphics cards at this point in time.
Maybe Team Green should have saved this one for the card's 25th anniversary. Will the RAM crisis be over by then?
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