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

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.

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moosedev an hour 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.)

	▲	cshores 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Which is kind of funny because the 1996 N64 RSP was a programmable GPU with Hardware T&L.

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theandrewbailey an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware

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

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