If you want to display a 3D model, it has to go through the graphics pipeline, which at this stage was all handled by the CPU. Nvidia’s GeForce 256 was the first consumer graphics chip to handle the whole 3D graphics pipeline, including the transform and lighting stages Up until the mid-1990s, 3D games such as Doom and later Quake were rendered entirely in software by the CPU, with the latter being one of the first games to require a floating point unit. It was October 1999, and the first 3D accelerators had only been doing the rounds for a few years. If we want to understand what made the first GeForce GPU so special, we first have to take a look at 3D pipelines of the time. Nvidia’s first ‘GPU’ did indeed handle 3D graphics quite differently from its peers at the time, so it’s time for a little history lesson. Not only did ‘GPU’ stick for decades to come, but it also meant Nvidia was the only company with a ‘GPU’ at this point. At the time, I thought it seemed pompous – how could this relative newcomer to the 3D graphics scene have the nerve to think it could change the language of graphics? But I now see that it was a piece of marketing genius. ‘In an event that ushers in a new era of interactivity for the PC, Nvidia unveiled today the GeForce 256, the world’s first graphics processing unit (GPU)’, it said. We didn’t get press releases via email then – they were physically posted to us, and the editorial assistant sorted them all into a box for the team to peruse. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, I was introduced to the term ‘GPU’ by a paper press release the same week I started my first tech journalism job in September 1999.

A VisionTek GeForce 256 card with SDR memory

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