An enchanting artifact dating back to when Nvidia was firmly a gaming-first company has resurfaced on social media. Its reappearance is giving many seasoned PC enthusiasts pangs of nostalgia. Redditor Inclusive_3Dprinting has shown off a very nicely preserved Dawn and Dusk demo PC (circa 2004), resplendent with its original digital fairy artwork. Accompanying it, but not currently installed, is the original brass I/O bracketed GeForce FX5950 Ultra graphics card with pixie green heatspreader that powered the famous demo.
[Some pictures of my Nvid…
An enchanting artifact dating back to when Nvidia was firmly a gaming-first company has resurfaced on social media. Its reappearance is giving many seasoned PC enthusiasts pangs of nostalgia. Redditor Inclusive_3Dprinting has shown off a very nicely preserved Dawn and Dusk demo PC (circa 2004), resplendent with its original digital fairy artwork. Accompanying it, but not currently installed, is the original brass I/O bracketed GeForce FX5950 Ultra graphics card with pixie green heatspreader that powered the famous demo.
Some pictures of my Nvidia Dawn and Dusk demo machine + Brass FX5950 Ultra from r/pcmasterrace
“I took this home from work around 2005. It has a looping demo of Dawn and Dusk and a few other demos,” wrote the lucky Redditor. “It currently has a 7800 AGP inside it but I still have the original FX5950 Ultra. For some reason the card has a brass I/O plate, and a brass top rail decoration,” they explained. Then, to refresh the time-worn craniums of those who remember the nVidia Dusk Demo when it was a technical tour de force, Inclusive_3Dprinting shared the video below in breathtaking HD 720p.
nVidia Dusk Demo (HD) - YouTube 
If you want a deeper trip down memory lane, Tom’s Hardware featured the Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card back in January 2004. It looks identical to the sample that Inclusive_3Dprinting shows sitting beside their demo system, except for our review model’s white metal I/O bracket.
As we mentioned back in 2004, this card, featuring the Nvidia NV38 GPU with 256MB DDR RAM on a 256-bit bus, was built to make the most of the then-cutting-edge DirectX 9 API. It was bundled with titles from the Tomb Raider and Rainbow Six franchises to show off its capabilities.
Those wishing to test out the old Dusk demo, featuring Dawn’s racy twin sister, can still test it on their choice of hardware thanks to the Internet Archive preserving access to this 83.4MB demo. The Dusk demo showcased true-to-life skin and hair visuals, delivering the most realistic human-like real-time character animations of the era on consumer hardware.
At some period, lost in the sands of time, the Redditor swapped out the FX 5950 Ultra in favor of a GeForce 7800GS, which we reviewed in February 2006. It has remained with this upgrade ever since, but thankfully the original brass bracket card wasn’t lost to time.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.