Leader in the graphics card market Nvidia, Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the launch of the GeForce 256.
The official statement from Nvidia on this subject was as follows: “Amid the booming tech culture of the millennial era, the launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce 256, noticed only by hardcore PC gamers and tech enthusiasts, made such an impact that, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary today, it laid the foundations for today’s productive artificial intelligence. GeForce 256 went beyond being an ordinary graphics card and was introduced as the world’s first GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), paving the way for future innovations in computing as well as in the gaming world. It lightened the load on the CPU with its hardware transform and lighting (T&L) features, and this was an important development. As Tom’s Hardware highlights: “The GeForce 256 can lighten the load on the CPU, prevent the 3D pipeline from clogging up, and allow game developers to use many more polygons, which automatically means a huge increase in detail.”
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For gamers, running Quake III Arena on a GeForce 256 was a revolution. As the tech enthusiasts at AnandTech put it, “The moment you fire up your favorite game, it feels like you’ve never seen it before.” The GeForce 256 was a perfect match for groundbreaking games like Unreal Tournament, one of the first games with realistic renderings and selling more than 1 million copies in its first year.
Over the next quarter century, collaboration between game developers and NVIDIA continued to push boundaries, paving the way for innovations such as increasingly realistic textures, dynamic lighting, and smoother frame rates. These innovations go beyond just offering immersive experiences to gamers, they have provided radical changes in the gaming world.
NVIDIA’s GPUs have evolved into a platform that transforms new silicon and software into powerful and compelling innovations that have fundamentally reshaped the gaming world. In the decades to come, NVIDIA GPUs delivered higher frame rates and visual fidelity, resulting in smoother and more responsive gaming experiences. This performance boost has been adopted by platforms such as Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Facebook, where gamers can stream content with incredible clarity and speed.
These performance increases have not only transformed the gaming experience, but also enabled players to take on a new role in the entertainment world. This has accelerated the global growth of e-sports. Major events such as The International (Dota 2), League of Legends World Championship and Fortnite World Cup have drawn millions of viewers, making esports a global phenomenon and creating new opportunities for competitive gaming.
As game worlds have become more complex, their computational demands have also increased. The parallel power that revolutionized the field of game graphics attracted the attention of researchers; They realized that these GPUs could also unlock huge computing potential in artificial intelligence, paving the way for innovations far beyond the gaming world.
Deep learning, a software model based on billions of neurons and trillions of connections, requires enormous computing power. Traditional CPUs designed for sequential tasks could not handle this workload efficiently. But GPUs, with their massively parallel architectures, were perfect for the job. By 2011, AI researchers discovered NVIDIA GPUs and their ability to meet the massive computing needs of deep learning.
Researchers at Google, Stanford, and New York University have begun using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate AI development, achieving performance previously required by supercomputers. A major breakthrough came in 2012, when Alex Krizhevsky from the University of Toronto won the ImageNet image recognition competition using NVIDIA GPUs. AlexNet, a neural network trained on millions of images, outperformed its competitors by outperforming hand-crafted software written by visual experts.
This heralded a radical change in technology. What once seemed like science fiction — computers learning and adapting from huge piles of data — had now become reality with the raw power of GPUs. By 2015, AI had reached superhuman levels of perception; Google, Microsoft and Baidu achieved this success by surpassing human performance in tasks such as image recognition and speech understanding, thanks to deep neural networks running on GPUs.
In 2016, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang donated the first NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer equipped with eight cutting-edge GPUs to OpenAI. This system would use GPUs to train ChatGPT, launching in November 2022. In 2018, NVIDIA introduced the GeForce RTX (20 Series) with RT Cores and Tensor Cores designed specifically for real-time ray tracing and AI workloads. This innovation accelerated the adoption of ray-traced graphics in games and brought cinematic realism to game visuals. It also introduced artificial intelligence-supported features such as NVIDIA DLSS, which improves gaming performance by leveraging deep learning.
ChatGPT, launched in 2022, reached more than 100 million users within a few months of its launch, demonstrating how NVIDIA GPUs continue the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence. Nowadays, GPUs aren’t just celebrated in the gaming world; They’ve become icons of tech culture, appearing in Reddit memes, Twitch streams, t-shirts at Comic-Con, and even being immortalized in custom PC builds and digital fan art.
This revolution, which started with the GeForce 256, continues today in both the gaming and entertainment worlds. Powered by NVIDIA GPUs, AI has now become a part of daily life on personal computers, and trillion-dollar industries are integrating next-generation AI at the core of their business.
GPUs aren’t just enhancing games, they’re also designing the future of artificial intelligence. And now, with innovations like NVIDIA DLSS, which uses artificial intelligence to improve gaming performance and deliver sharper images, and NVIDIA ACE, designed to bring more realistic interactions to in-game characters, AI is once again shaping the gaming world.
The GeForce 256 laid the foundations for a future where gaming, computing and artificial intelligence not only evolve, but together transform the world. The PC gaming community can participate in events organized by NVIDIA on its social media channels. They also have the opportunity to participate in competitions for Retro Sleeper PCs from the 1999 period. “These PCs feature NVIDIA’s latest GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER GPUs, as well as period-appropriate announcements that will take you on a nostalgic journey.”