25 years have passed since NVIDIA launched its first GPU and launched the line GeForce with the GeForce 256. At that time, it was 3dfx the company that dominated the market with its graphics cards and there was also ATI with its VGAs, however, This GeForce 256 laid the foundations for a brilliant career which made them the undisputed leaders of the graphics card market years later (including the acquisition of 3dfx itself along with all its technologies such as SLI).
Although we say that it is the first GPU, it is not the first graphics card by any means, the company itself had launched models such as the RIVA TNT and other companies had been on the market for some time. However, the The term GPU (graphics processing unit) is an invention of NVIDIA itself, that integrated into a chip a hardware transformation and lighting system, rendering engine, DDR and other elements that made graphics cards take on much more prominence by taking care of tasks that, until now, were processed by the computer in a much more efficient way. CPU.
That meant a paradigm shift in the way games were developed, and it represented an important evolution in the graphic quality of titles that would arrive later. Games like Unreal Tournament 0 Quake III Arena were common at the time that became powerful selling points for these cards.
Since that GeForce 256, 25 years have passedand you only have to look at the company’s most recent models, like the GeForce RTX 4090 to see the enormous evolution that GPUs have hadbecoming a key element not only for games, but for acceleration of all types of multimedia, computing and, more recently, Artificial Intelligence applications.
Gone, however, are the times when the most powerful graphics card of the moment barely occupied a slot and was cooled with a small fan measuring a few centimeters, feeding from the port itself. Today we have models that exceed 3 slots, with enormous cooling systems, with several fans and TDPs that will soon exceed 600 W that require extremely powerful power supplies. Of course, with capabilities and functions that we couldn’t even dream of 25 years ago.
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