A quarter of a century for what NVIDIA describes as the " world's first GPU ".
While marketing has a lot to do with the " world's first GPU " appellation, there's no denying that the GeForce 256 has marked its era, perhaps even more so than its predecessors. On August 31, 1999, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, made a major announcement for the graphics card world: the GeForce 256 would soon be available, and with it, Transform & Lightning intended to reshuffle the deck. This is clearly not the only major development we owe to NVIDIA today, but it has undoubtedly made a major contribution to creating the legend.
August 31, 1999 is not the actual launch date for the GeForce 256. In fact, the cards were only available several weeks later, and in two stages. First, on October 11, 1999, NVIDIA launched the GeForce 256 SDR with simple SDRAM as video memory. It was only two months later, in December, that the GeForce 256 DDR hit the market. Today, proving that there was a before and an after to GeForce, NVIDIA products still bear this absolutely emblematic name.
The NV10 chip at the heart of the GeForce 256 © Wikipedia
Dubbed " the world's first GPU " by NVIDIA's communications experts, the GeForce 256 chip is codenamed NV10. It integrates 23 million transistors, and NVIDIA boasts its ability to process 10 million polygons per second. We're also talking about a chip capable of reaching a frequency of 120 MHz, while its memory (SDR or DDR) is 32 MB on a 128-bit interface bus for a bandwidth of 4.8 GB/s. These were revolutionary figures at the time, but today they make us smile. Pending the arrival of the GeForce 5000, the GeForce RTX 4090 and its AD102 GPU total 76 billion transistors! We're talking about a frequency of 2.52 GHz here, while video memory climbs to 24 GB with a 384-bit interface bus for a bandwidth of 1008 GB/s.
An anniversary that shows us the evolution of GPUs over a quarter-century, and the inflation that has accompanied these technical advances. Consider that the GeForce 256 SDR was launched at an MSRP of $199, while NVIDIA set the same MSRP at $1,599 for the GeForce RTX 4090. Even taking inflation into account (GeForce 256 SDR at around $380), it's clearly not worth it.
