On August 31, 1999, nVIDIA (as it was then spelled) announced the GeForce 256 graphics card, which was released on October 11 of the same year. Marketed as "the world's first GPU," this graphics card revolutionized the industry. The term GPU (an abbreviation for Graphics Processing Unit) was also coined by NVIDIA.
A groundbreaking feature of the GeForce 256 was the inclusion of transformation and lighting (T&L) capabilities directly within the GPU. Previously, these computations were handled by the central processor or separate hardware. The integration of T&L into the GPU allowed NVIDIA to reduce costs and improve performance compared to traditional 3D accelerators. With this architectural leap and optimized software, NVIDIA managed to outpace its competitors.
As co-founder Chris Malachowski notes, when the GeForce 256 was released, NVIDIA had 35 competitors. Some of these companies were acquired by NVIDIA, while others exited the market—only ATI, which was purchased by AMD, survived. Today, the GPU market includes Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, yet NVIDIA remains dominant. Since the launch of the GeForce 256, graphics processors have significantly advanced, now equipped with video encoding blocks, ray tracing capabilities, and tensor cores. These features are crucial in gaming, professional visualization, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
The GeForce 256 featured SDR memory but was later upgraded to DDR and supported DirectX 7.0. The chip contained 23 million transistors—a figure that has increased 3,300 times in the GeForce RTX 4090, while the memory capacity has expanded 768 times.
Source: VideoCardz
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