That time seems to pass us by too fast. Only yesterday I read the Score and the article about the first GPU. No, it wasn’t yesterday. It’s been 25 years already.
In 1999, we were about to end the world in the form of Y2KMatrix came out, id Soft flashed with Quake 3, Voodoo Graphics was still top and NVIDIA released GeForce 256the world’s first GPU (graphics processor unit). The main milestone of the novelty at the time was hardware transformations and lighting (T&L), which until then were sitting on the processor and eating a disproportionate amount of power. And it was Quake 3 or the brand new Unreal Tournament that were the first games that supported T&L. And that’s how it started back then, the graphics went on a brutal development and it snorted like fat.
But while gamers used to be important to NVIDIA, today we play second, third, maybe fourth fiddle, because current GPUs are far from being designed only for steaming and T&L (ahem). Today’s budding players are extremely powerful all-round GPUs that primarily push the much-vaunted AI forward. Of course, NV has not completely failed us, the performance and image quality are increasing, we have techniques such as ray tracing or DLSS, even recently the memory has finally increased. So let’s see what awaits us next.
Source: pctuning.cz
