The First GPU: GeForce 256
Hardware transform and lighting changes 3D graphics forever.
Explore this event on the interactive timeline →NVIDIA coined the term "GPU" (Graphics Processing Unit) with the release of the GeForce 256. By offloading polygon transformation and lighting calculations from the CPU directly onto the graphics card, it massively accelerated real-time 3D rendering.
Verified Facts
- Before the GPU, the computer's main CPU had to calculate where every single triangle was in 3D space, heavily bottlenecking performance.
- The GeForce 256 had a fill rate of 480 million pixels per second (and was marketed at 10-15 million polygons per second), revolutionizing PC gaming with titles like Quake III Arena.
- The massively parallel architecture pioneered by early GPUs would eventually be repurposed a decade later to train deep learning AI models.