Yet another Hacker News

16 points ibobev 4 hours ago 6 comments

glimshe 32 minutes ago | parent

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

xnx 18 minutes ago | parent

Or the Riva 128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_128

moosedev 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

glimshe 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

a3w 26 minutes ago | parent

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".

ajaimk 3 minutes ago | parent

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