Today 11 October 2024 an important birthday is celebrated, the 25th anniversary of NVIDIA GeForce 256. Today, in fact, marks the day in which, way back in 1999, the card was made available for the first time, the beginning of what we can define as a “revolution“.
For gamers it was a real turning point: there was not just talk of another graphics accelerator, but of the first GPU in the world. Since then, GeForce 256 has contributed to redefine gaming introducing Transform and Lighting hardware technologies and shifting developers’ focus to the GPU.
It runs on a Catfish GeForce 256
Mind you, 3D accelerator cards already existed, and so did the term GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), but NVIDIA presented it as the first GPU in the world, as it was the first chip with Transform and Lighting hardware support and rendering units capable of process 15 million polygons and 480 million pixels, all every second. The GPU on board the card, NV10, had 23 million transistors.
Gaming wasn’t the only revolution of GeForce 256: in addition to titles that changed the world of gaming, such as Unreal Tournament e Quake III Arenawhose legacy can be felt in today’s games, the first GPU was the beginning of an evolution that for over a decade has led GPUs to be GPGPUcapable of dealing with workloads other than graphics alone: this is how we arrived at advances in artificial intelligence research and to make GPUs a faithful companion of creator who want to improve and speed up their creations.
Paolo Corsini, editor-in-chief and CEO of Hardware Upgradewho reviewed the GeForce 256 in 1999, comment: “GeForce 256 was the first NVIDIA chip from the GeForce family, as well as the first GPU to be made available on the consumer market. The support for transform & lightning via hardware allowed that card, 25 years ago, to establish new references in terms of PC gaming.”
“25 years have passed since the initial marketing of the GeForce 256, the world of 3D graphics has seen an incredible evolution: PC gaming has become increasingly complex and accessible to every enthusiast. But all of this, perhaps, would not have happened without the initial innovations of that product launched in the autumn of 1999 and which I have been lucky enough to have in my hands for 25 years in which NVIDIA has been able to continue a tradition born with the first card of the GeForce family, the GeForce 256 model.“.
Source: www.hwupgrade.it
