NVIDIA Celebrates 25 Years Of GeForce With A Trip Down 3D Memory Lane
Most of HotHardware's audience probably doesn't need to be told that, as you, like us, were probably there twenty-five years ago for the launch of the original GeForce card. That's right: it's been twenty-five years since NVIDIA released the GeForce256 SDR version, to be followed later by the GeForce256 with DDR SDRAM onboard. The GeForce256 was the chip that prompted NVIDIA to coin the term "GPU," as it was one of the first graphics processors that was anything more than just a dumb rasterizer.
While earlier GPUs had included some measure of additional processing capability onboard, it was the GeForce256 that brought hardware transform & lighting capability to consumer GPUs. This allowed the graphics card to take some of the load of geometry setup and vertex lighting calculations off of the CPU—a critical step forward when everyone was still using single-core processors, and mostly at sub-GHz speeds, too.
Games like Quake III Arena, Drakan: Order of the Flame, Homeworld, and Giants: Citizen Kabuto were among the first to make use of the integrated geometry and lighting hardware on the GeForce256, and it could really be a game-changer for users on the slower CPUs of the day. While a fast CPU could more than make up for the lack of such hardware, fast CPUs of the time could be unbelievably expensive. The 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 cost $777 on its release in 2000 for just the CPU alone; that would be equivalent to $1422 today—and you still had to buy pricey RDRAM memory, too.
NVIDIA has its own blog post up reminiscing about the advancements of the GeForce256, if you'd like to read it. While NVIDIA may be synonymous with "AI" and make the vast majority of its profits in the datacenter these days, the company hasn't forgotten its origins, and doom-and-gloom over the future of gaming GPUs at NVIDIA is likely highly exaggerated. As long as the company's founding leadership is in place, we expect GeForce GPUs will keep on coming.
Update: NVIDIA's doing a PC giveaway on Xwitter for three retro-style PC builds with modern hardware inside, including GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER GPUs. All you have to do is like the tweet and comment with the "#GeForceDay" hashtag for a chance to win.
