GeForce 256: NVIDIA Marks 25th Anniversary of “World’s First GPU” with Celebratory Video, Green Popcorn, and More

Tsing

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The GeForce 256, a revolutionary and iconic piece of hardware that debuted over two decades ago in 1999 but remains fondly remembered by tech enthusiasts as being the world's first GPU, has officially turned 25 years old, according to a new blog post that NVIDIA shared last week, one that discusses how the graphics card "leveled up gaming" and "ignited the AI era."

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The Geforce 256 put the very first nail in 3dfx coffin. Once it came out, voodoo had to play catch up and failed.

I actually skipped the 256, at the time I had a TNT2, I went with the geforce 2 pro, awesome card.
 
Stoly said:
The Geforce 256 put the very first nail in 3dfx coffin. Once it came out, voodoo had to play catch up and failed.

I actually skipped the 256, at the time I had a TNT2, I went with the geforce 2 pro, awesome card.
Click to expand...
Sort of. 3DFX management f*cked themselves with the STB purchase, that was a terrible move that set them back on all sorts of levels. If they had just stuck with their oem partners and pushed harder on Rampage they could still be relevant today.

Also Sega kind of helped with the screwing as well, 3DFX diverted too many resources trying to win the Dreamcast contract. And at the last second Sega said "nah". But one could argue 3DFX shouldn't have been chasing console dreams anyway. Again with the wonky management decisions.

I think I had a TNT at some point and wasn't thrilled with it. Next one was Geforce 2 and it was pretty on par with the V5500 I had been using.
 
You know, I don't think I have ever used or owned a GeForce 256, when it was around I had a Voodoo2, and then I think around this time I had upgraded or got a Rage 128 from ATI, instead.
 
Stoly said:
The Geforce 256 put the very first nail in 3dfx coffin. Once it came out, voodoo had to play catch up and failed.

I actually skipped the 256, at the time I had a TNT2, I went with the geforce 2 pro, awesome card.
Click to expand...
The Riva TNT2 Utra's were knocking 3DFX around before the GeForce became a thing.
 
Burticus said:
Sort of. 3DFX management f*cked themselves with the STB purchase, that was a terrible move that set them back on all sorts of levels. If they had just stuck with their oem partners and pushed harder on Rampage they could still be relevant today.
Click to expand...

AFAIK Rampage could not compete with nvidia. Actually, after the buyout, nvidia pretty much scrapped everything from 3dfx tech wise. At the time 3dfx was way behind from what nvidia was working on.
 
Didn't we have this same news story like a month ago?

Either way, I still call bullshit on the whole "first GPU" thing.

That is only true if they use a very contrived and narrow definition of "GPU" based on their own products.

I'd argue 3DFX and even Matrox and possibly even others beat them to the punch.
 
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