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| Geforce 256, circa 1999. Picture by Pete Mason, http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/28468-nvidia-tsmc -ship-billionth-geforce-gpu/ |
ur pc is bad
The year is 1999. 3d-accelerated graphics cards are all the rage. Everywhere you looked, there would be a new graphics card listing, offering "fluid 3d motion with support for the new and advanced DirectX 6 API". But games still required a fast CPU to do most of the in-game visual effects such as Transform & Lighting. nVidia was about to change that. October, 1999, nVidia releases the GeForce 256. Unlike big name graphics cards, like the 3dfx Voodoo lineup, the GeForce 256 renders most of the in-game visual effects, taking a lot of work off the CPU, making it the world's first "GPU". And it does this by integrating the Transform & Lighting engine with the graphics card. This meant that you could pair the 256 with a low-budget CPU, like the Celeron processors, and get better performance than a graphics card with no dedicated T&L engine paired with a high-end Pentium processor. If that wasn't revolutionary enough, nVidia also released a 256 with DDR memory, making it several times faster than other competing graphics cards. Hardware T&L wasn't a big deal during the 90's, with only a few games supporting it. But today, every 3d game you see takes advantage of GPU-side T&L. The GeForce 256 did so well that it received driver support up until 2005, the final drivers offering support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 1.5. If not for nVidia, and their revolutionary GeForce 256 card, just how different would pc games and hardware be?
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