Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
A retro blog recounts Nvidia’s 1999 GeForce 256, marketed as its first GPU, and Sega’s earlier bailout.
A retro-computing post recalls that Nvidia released the GeForce 256 on October 11, 1999, and marketed it as a GPU, citing its hardware transform-and-lighting engine. The card mainly benefited low-end CPUs, while faster processors could still do that work in software. The post also describes Sega’s roughly $5 million 1996 investment after a failed Dreamcast chip project and Nvidia’s December 15, 2000 purchase of most of 3dfx’s intellectual property.
- GeForce 256 launched on October 11, 1999, as Nvidia’s first marketed GPU.
- Hardware transform and lighting mainly helped PCs with slow CPUs.
- Sega’s roughly $5 million 1996 investment helped Nvidia survive.
- Nvidia bought most of 3dfx’s intellectual property on December 15, 2000.
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On October 11, 1999, Nvidia released its GeForce 256, its first product that it described as a GPU.
What made the Nvidia GeForce 256 the first GPU?
I’m sure 3dfx fans would argue that 3dfx made GPUs, and it seems a little arbitrary to say the GeForce was a GPU and the TNT2 wasn’t. It was more powerful than the TNT2 and offered more features, but what feature did the GeForce have that made it a GPU and the TNT2 not a GPU? The transform and lighting engine, maybe?
The concept of offloading work from the CPU onto a graphics coprocessor was nothing new. Commodore did it with the Amiga way back in 1985. And 3dfx was doing it on PCs as early as 1996.
But Nvidia didn’t use the term until October 1999. It continues to use it today, though, and it also uses the GeForce brand.
The GeForce 256 wasn’t necessarily an immediate game changer. It was a real boon for systems with low-end CPUs like 300 MHz Celerons, but faster CPUs could do transform and lighting in software faster than the GeForce 256 could do in hardware. But the concept of offloading these tasks from the CPU was a good one. A lot of gamers at the time were on a budget and had low-end CPUs like Celerons. Nvidia stayed ahead of Intel by creating follow-up graphics cards more frequently than they had in the past. Nvidia’s follow-up GeForce GPUs fared well.
The GeForce 256 wasn’t Nvidia’s first product and wasn’t their first graphics card, but if they want to say it was their first GPU, I’m not sure too many people will argue with them. Or it could be the GeForce 256 was the first just because Nvidia didn’t invent the term until the GeForce 256.
Nvidia bailout by Sega
Today Nvidia is one of the most successful companies in the world. But it struggled early on.
Three years after its founding in 1993, Nvidia partnered with Sega to design the video for the Dreamcast console in 1996. Nvidia’s chip wasn’t up to the task Sega was asking of it, they were out of money, and couldn’t finish the project. Sega bailed them out with a $5 million investment in the company. Sega made its money back along with a $10 million profit, so it worked out fine for Sega in the end. The Dreamcast ended up with a chip manufactured by NEC in the Dreamcast, after Sega also considered a chip designed by 3dfx.
The money from Sega helped Nvidia introduce the Riva 128 chip, which sold more than a million units and led to the successful TNT2, followed by the GeForce 256. If it hadn’t been for Sega’s investment, Nvidia could have gone out of business before 3dfx did, and perhaps 3dfx would have survived instead. Instead, Nvidia purchased most of 3dfx’s intellectual property on December 15, 2000. 3dfx wound down operations and went bankrupt October 15, 2002.
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David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.