Part of the problem was the 256’s memory, which was single data rate, or SDR. This is one of the primary reasons why Nvidia claims this is the first GPU.Īs a product, the GeForce 256 wasn’t exactly legendary: Anandtech wasn’t super impressed by its price for the performance at the time of its release. However, CPUs were not very efficient at doing this, which is where the 256 came in with hardware transforming and lighting, offloading the two most CPU intensive parts of rendering onto the GPU. Before the 256, the CPU played a very important role in rendering graphics, to the point where the CPU was directly completing steps in rendering a 3D environment. Nvidia is right that the 256 was important, however. What Nvidia really invented was the marketing of graphics cards as GPUs, because in 1999 when the 256 came out, terms like graphics card and graphics chipset were more common.
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Before GeForce there were the RIVA series of graphics cards, and there were other companies making their own competing graphics cards then, too. GeForce 256 The very first VGA MuseumĪlthough Nvidia often claims the GeForce 256 was the world’s first GPU, that’s only true if Nvidia is the only company that gets to define what a GPU is. It was hard to choose which Nvidia GPUs were truly worthy of being called the best of all time, but I’ve narrowed down the list to six cards that were truly important and made history. Those only set Nvidia up for a major comeback, however, and sometimes that led to a real game-changing card. Nvidia has long been the dominant player in the graphics card market, but the company has from time to time been put under serious pressure by its main rival AMD, which has launched several of its own iconic GPUs.
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