Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256

ajaimk 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The Riva 128 says, "What am I, chopped liver?"

	▲	TrainedMonkey a minute ago \| parent [-]
		NV1 is the chopped liver, Riva 128 was commercially successful so it's foie gras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1

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a3w an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

First we had video or graphics accelerators, for video, or rendering. Then 2D/3D mentions with different performance or quality became a topic.

Then we got GPUs to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".

Then those were recoined into GPGPU, as in general purpose GPU, when CUDA became an important feature and again to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".

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glimshe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What about the NV1? It was marketed as a "3D accelerator" but was a GPU nonetheless.

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moosedev 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To the best of my recollection, the GeForce 256 was the first one that was marketed as a “GPU” and began to popularize that term in the industry.

Specifically because it did transformation and lighting calcs in (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware, instead of in software on the main CPU.

Yes, NVIDIA made 3D accelerators before the GeForce line. I have many of them in my collection. But (IIRC) it did not market them as “GPUs”. That term wasn’t really used yet.

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Maxious 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"The GeForce 256, which nVidia calls the world's first graphics processing unit, will be the successor to its TNT 2 line of graphics chips." https://web.archive.org/web/20241023155821/https://money.cnn...

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theandrewbailey 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware

I think the term you're looking for is fixed-function hardware.

	▲	moosedev 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Funnily enough, I already “found” that term in my brain and then decided to write “non-programmable” in the hope of being a bit clearer to readers who don’t know this space and its specialized terms already. But thank you for condescending anyway.

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glimshe 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Got it. Well, to be honest the marketing distinction isn't terribly interesting. But it would still be cool to see how the early GPUs (even if not called that) evolved.

	▲	moosedev 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Doing all those calculations in hardware (the distinction the marketing was based on) seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, at least within the context of consumer PC graphics cards. (It had long existed in the high-end workstation space, SGI etc. but the workstation and consumer PC ecosystems were more separated than they are these days.)

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xnx 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Or the Riva 128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_128