Today marks exactly 25 years since the release of the GeForce 256 video card, which Nvidia itself calls nothing less than “the world’s first graphics processor.” At the time, Nvidia defined the term as “a single-chip processor with built-in transformation, lighting, triangle adjustment/clipping and rendering engines, processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second.”
Image source: Nvidia
The capabilities of the GeForce 256 significantly distinguished it from other graphics solutions. The GeForce 256 arrived at a time when gamers were eager to experience Quake III Arena and were captivated by the iconic visuals of The Matrix.
Although we already had a note about the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256, today marks exactly 25 years since the start of sales of this video card. It appeared on the market on October 11, 1999. Nvidia also reported that it sold 1 million GeForce 256 graphics cards during the first year (the last three months of 1999), highlighting its immediate impact on the gaming industry.
To mark the anniversary, Nvidia’s Manuel Guzman of Software QA shared a photo of the company’s cafeteria celebrating with green popcorn, a nod to the iconic green color associated with the Nvidia brand.
The NV10 GPU in the GeForce 256 had only 23 million transistors – a tiny number compared to the 76.3 billion transistors that are present in the current flagship AD102 GPU, which serves as the basis for the GeForce RTX 4090 video card. The GeForce 256 video memory was only 32 MB, which a stark contrast to the 24GB of memory (768 times more) that the RTX 4090 boasts today.
Nvidia also released a video showing the evolution of graphics technology, including a selection of very old graphics demos and game footage. Unfortunately, the video turned out to be very short. It would also be interesting to see interviews with people who were involved in the development of the projects shown in the video.
