To the best of my recollection, the GeForce 256 was the first one that was marketed as a “GPU” and began to popularize that term in the industry.
Specifically because it did transformation and lighting calcs in (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware, instead of in software on the main CPU.
Yes, NVIDIA made 3D accelerators before the GeForce line. I have many of them in my collection. But (IIRC) it did not market them as “GPUs”. That term wasn’t really used yet.
Funnily enough, I already “found” that term in my brain and then decided to write “non-programmable” instead, in the hopes of being a bit clearer to readers who don’t know this space and its specialized terms already.
Got it. Well, to be honest the marketing distinction isn't terribly interesting. But it would still be cool to see how the early GPUs (even if not called that) evolved.
Doing all those calculations in hardware (the distinction the marketing was based on) seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, at least within the context of consumer PC graphics cards. (It had long existed in the high-end workstation space, SGI etc. but the workstation and consumer PC ecosystems were more separated than they are these days.)
There were many periods in the 80s and 90s where console graphics hardware was kinda ahead of (even high-end/enthusiast) PC graphics hardware in certain ways that mattered for games of the time. Hasn't really been the case for a couple decades now, I guess.
I was gonna say hey that isn't true, the PS3 had hardware that was ahead of PC graphics hardware, and then I realized that was a couple decades ago. Oof.
Yeah, Cell was a disaster, and it showed Sony leadership at the time was actually clueless about big reasons the PSX and PS2 were so successful (it's the developers dummies!)
Really the PS3's only saving grace was it was a great deal for a Blu-ray player.
The big feature of the GeForce 256 was hardware offloading of transform and lighting calculations. While it was fixed function it was programmable. This offloaded a pretty significant amount of work from the CPU and lightened the IO load single the math was done on geometry living in the VRAM.
The NV1 and other cards before the GF256 did accelerated drawing and geometry raster but lighting and transformations were done on the CPU in main memory then transferred to VRAM and rasterized.
Even if the GF256 had say the same texel output performance as a TNT2, the T&L running on the GPU would allow for more complex scenes at higher frame rates than a TNT2 doing T&L on the CPU. The GF256 also had better raster performance so for many games it was just a "free" performance upgrade over a TNT2.
