The big picture

What these eight cards add up to

You've seen the individual comparisons. Here's the number that puts everything in perspective.

Detecting your device…

Where this leads

The eight cards on this wall span a decade and a half — 2003 to 2018. In that time, transistor counts grew by 216×, memory by 31×, and raw compute by roughly 400×. Each generation arrived with new promises, new failures, and new rivalries.

But the arc doesn't stop here. The card that closes this collection — the GTX 760 — was the generation where engineers started asking a different question. Not just "how fast can it render?" but "what else can it compute?"

The GPU that learned to draw shadows in 2003 became, a decade later, the chip that would teach machines to see. The same parallel architecture — thousands of tiny cores doing the same operation at once — turns out to be exactly what you need to train a neural network.

Every modern AI system — image generators, language models, the tools recommending what you watch and translating what you say — runs on the descendants of cards like these. The GTX 760's Kepler architecture is a direct ancestor of the chips NVIDIA builds for AI datacenters today.

The phone in your hand carries forward the same lineage. The GPU that fits in your pocket, runs on a battery, and renders your camera's portrait mode in real time — it is, in a direct technical sense, the child of what's mounted on this wall.

These cards didn't just power games. They powered the future.