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The Early Days of 3D Consumer Graphics
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iSBX 275 Video Graphics Controller
In 1983, Intel made the iSBX 275 Video Graphics Controller Multimodule Board, for industrial systems based on the Multibus standard -
Commodore Amiga
Released in 1985, the Commodore Amiga was one of the first personal computers to come standard with a GPU -
TMS34010 Release
In 1986, Texas Instruments released the TMS34010, the first microprocessor with on-chip graphics capabilities. -
IBM 8514 graphics system
In 1987, the IBM 8514 graphics system was released as one of the first video cards for IBM PC compatibles to implement fixed-function 2D primitives in electronic hardware. -
Introducing S3 86C911
In 1991, S3 Graphics introduced the S3 86C911, which its designers named after the Porsche 911 as an implication of the performance increase it promised. -
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3Dfx Voodoo: The Game-changer
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Launching 3Dfx's Voodoo graphics
Launched on November 1996, 3Dfx's Voodoo graphics consisted of a 3D-only card that required a VGA cable pass-through from a separate 2D card to the Voodoo, which then connected to the display. -
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The Nvidia vs. ATI Era Begins
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ATI Radeon 9700
By October 2002, with the introduction of the ATI Radeon 9700 (also known as R300), the world's first Direct3D 9.0 accelerator, pixel and vertex shaders could implement looping and lengthy floating point math, and in general were quickly becoming as flexible as CPUs, and orders of magnitude faster for image-array operations. Pixel shading is often used for things like bump mapping, which adds texture, to make an object look shiny, dull, rough, or even round or extruded. -
Reintroducing SLI
The acronym SLI was first used by 3dfx for Scan-Line Interleave, which was introduced to the consumer market in 1998 and used in the Voodoo2 line of video cards. After buying out 3dfx, NVIDIA acquired the technology but did not use it. NVIDIA later reintroduced the SLI name in 2004 and intended for it to be used in modern computer systems based on the PCI Express (PCIe) bus; however, the technology behind the name SLI has changed dramatically. -
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The Modern GPU: Stream processing units a.k.a. GPGPU
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AMD CrossFireX
AMD CrossFireX (previously known as CrossFire) is a brand name for the multi-GPU solution by Advanced Micro Devices, originally developed by ATI Technologies. The technology allows up to four GPUs to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance. -
Microsoft DirectX 11,0
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Microsoft unveiled DirectX 11 at the Gamefest 08 event in Seattle, with the major scheduled features including GPGPU support (DirectCompute), and Direct3D 11 with tessellation support and improved multi-threading support to assist video game developers in developing games that better utilize multi-core processors. -
Ultimate Power by Nvidia
"GeForce GTX TITAN Z is a gaming monster, built to power the most extreme gaming rigs on the planet. With a massive 5760 cores and 12 GB of 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory, TITAN Z gives you truly amazing performance - easily making it the fastest graphics card we’ve ever made."... No comments
