25 years have passed since GeForce 256, the first Nvidia graphics card that changed everything

25 years ago, while many young people were downloading Britney Spears and Eminem songs on Napster, Nvidia put its first graphics card on sale, the GeForce 256revolutionizing the market.

Until then, most video games used 2D, or software-generated 3D, graphics.

There were already pioneers like cards 3DFx Voodooor Nvidia’s own Riva TNT range, which offered hardware 3D graphics. But it was the graphics cards GeForcethe one that conquered the market.

This was the pioneer GeForce 256

On October 11, 1999, Nvidia put it on sale the GeForce 256 graphics card, considered the first GPU in history. You can see it in the opening photo of the news.

GeForce 256 not only accelerated 3D graphics management, freeing the CPU from this task. It was the first card to process hardware transformation and lighting (T&L).. This allowed us to create 3D games with much higher graphic quality, and more framerate.

Games like Quake III either Unreal Tournamenttwo of the best sellers of the year, showed realistic textures and light reflections that could only be created with this graphics card, starting NVIDIA’s dominance in the field of gaming graphics cardswhich 25 years later still stands.

Graphics cards have changed a lot in these 25 years. They are now able to handle the realistic lighting provided by ray tracing, and use AI to rescale the image and increase the framerate, with technologies such as DLSS 3.

Although artificial intelligence seems modern to us, as Nvidia indicates on your blogGoogle and Stanford and New York universities They started using Nvidia GPUs to accelerate AI development… in 2011!

In 2016, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang donated the first Nvidia DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI, which would leverage GPUs to train ChatGPT, starting the AI ​​revolution we are now experiencing.

Congratulations to Nvidia for this one 25th anniversary of its graphics cards. A market that now completely dominates, and no one is capable of overshadowing it.

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Tags: NVIDIA, Video games, Computers, Graphics cards, Retro