Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256

Per The NVIDIA Way [1], the GeForce 256 was branded as "the first GPU" for marketing reasons alone; the actual first GPU was the subsequent GeForce 3 (which introduced programmable shaders):

    [Sanford] Russell grabbed Michael Hara for a thirty-minute brainstorm session to figure out how to market the GeForce 256 more effectively, and both executives remember coming out of the room with the notion to call the new chip the first entry in an entirely new product category altogether: a graphics processing unit, or GPU, which would be to graphics rendering what the computer's main central processing unit (CPU) was for all other computational tasks.

    Even so, the GPU moniker, when applied first to the GeForce 256, was controversial among Nvidia engineers, who pointed out that a chip could not truly be called a GPU unless it had several features that the GeForce 256 did not. The chip lacked a "state machine," a technical term meaning a dedicated processor that transitions from various states to execute and fetch instructions, in the same manner that a CPU does for programming commands. It was not programmable, meaning that graphics styles and features could not easily be customized by third-party developers. Instead, developers would have to rely on a fixed set of Nvidia-defined hardware functions. Moreover, the GeForce 256 did not have its own programming language.

    But the marketing team argued that such features were already planned for the next generation of graphics chips. And even without them, the GeForce 256 delivered a step change in performance that would be obvious to every gamer and computer enthusiast in the world. While not literally a GPU, the GeForce 256 could still be a category-defining product. The chips that would follow-the "true" GPUs that would be fully programmable by outside developers-were coming soon enough.

    So Nvidia's marketing team pushed forward with the GPU name over the dissent of Nvidia's engineers. "We don't need anyone's approval," Vivoli told them. He didn't think anyone outside of the industry would really care about the technical definition. Besides, "we knew the next one was going to be programmable. We decided to take a leap, make a stretch that this is a GPU."

    In February 2001, Nvidia released the GeForce 3, whose programmable shader technology and support for third-party development of its core graphics functions made it the first true GPU.

The Riva 128 says, "What am I, chopped liver?"

I forget which early GPU-labelled card I got but when I got it, I aligned myself with nvidia (as a graphics provider) because it was clear that the pipelines could be re-used for other purposes (in my case, I wanted to run molecular dynamics simulations). The card replaced the previous one (ATI FireGL which had excellent OpenGL support for Linux early on) and I've stuck exclusively with nVidia since. They are the only company I've seen that saw the early vision and carried it through with focus through today. Nowadays I run a large fleet of nvidia GPUs for frontier research at work and also have the last few generations of cards in workstations at home.

What does it mean that the HN audience is far more sentimental about this hardware than NVidia's own remaining co-founder and CEO?

BTW, did you hear yet NV is stopping production for the 5090 RTX line? - the replacement chip will be 50% the size and transistors.

Might be the first GPU, but they made video cards well before the GeForce era... Riva 128 was their first card with 3D acceleration if I remember correctly?

First we had video or graphics accelerators, for video, or rendering. Then 2D/3D mentions with different performance or quality became a topic.

Then we got GPUs to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".

Then those were recoined into GPGPU, as in general purpose GPU, when CUDA became an important feature and again to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".

What about the NV1? It was marketed as a "3D accelerator" but was a GPU nonetheless.

Fun fact: "GeForce" is short for "Geometry Force".

Fascinating hardware history! Thanks for sharing!

I remember buying the Diamond Viper V330 with the nVidia RIVA but unable to use its power because of a lack of [nVidia] Linux support [1].

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/linux-readme-install/

Meh my Verite 1000 chip in my Creative 3d blaster was an actual mips processor. You could probably turn it into the worlds slowest ray tracer if you wanted to.