Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “History of GPUs As Fast As Possible”.
Since time immemorial, or at least the 1970s there’s been a never-ending demand for higher quality, smoother graphics in video games, but the very earliest GPUs in game consoles, weren’t really GPUs at all, instead of being general-purpose microprocessors that we see in modern graphics cards earlier, video controllers Were more or less hard-coded to only output, specific visuals for whatever video game, it was a part of it wasn’t long, though, before real CPU started to appear in video home game consoles, but for years, graphics, processing in both consoles and computers was handled by the CPU Itself, instead of having a separate GPU, it wasn’t till the mid-1980s that the modern concept of a discrete GPU started to take shape, including the commodore amiga x’ graphics, subsystem that offloaded video tasks from the cpu and texas instruments rolling out the very uncreated lee named TMS. Three four: zero one: zero in 1986, which was among the first of microprocessor, specifically designed to render graphics on its own. But it wasn’t until graphical user interfaces on computers were popularized by new operating systems like Windows, that what we think of as PC graphics, accelerators on an expansion card really took off, instead of being relegated only to top-end workstations out of the reach of average consumers. One particularly popular early video card was the IBM 85 14 / a from 1987, which supported 256 colors and took care of common 2d.
Rendering tasks like drawing lines on screens much faster than a regular CPU could handle thanks to its low cost. It spawned a number of clones and paved the way for further advances in 2d graphics. It was also around this time that a small Canadian company named ATI started producing its own graphics cards, notably the wonder series one of the first consumer product lines to support multiple monitors, as well as the ability to switch between a number of different graphics modes and Resolutions which was uncommon at the time, but these early graphics cards still relied on the main CPU for quite a few tasks and his 2d graphics became more complex in the early in mid-1990s we started seeing more and more powerful GPUs that could work more independently of The CPU, as well as the emergence of open application, programming interfaces or api’s, including OpenGL in 1992 or say DirectX in 1995.
These api’s enabled programmers to write code for them. That would work on many different graphics adapters, really helping to push the gaming industry forward by providing somewhat of a standard software platform for game studios. Of course, the real excitement in this area was the possibility of bringing 3d graphics to home PCs. Although the 1995 release of the original PlayStation console one of the first to support, true 3d graphics proved wildly successful, the PC side got off to a much slower start. One of the first 3d cards designed for consumer gaming was the s3 verge also released in 1995. Unfortunately, the verge was more of a 2d card, with 3d support kind of hastily added on and was notoriously so slow to the point where some gamers called the verge: a graphics, decelerate er, not exactly flattering other cards like the 3d FX voodoo from 1996 were actually 3D, only meaning that you need a separate card for day-to-day computing huh, but at least the Vudu was notable for being the first ever card to support.
Multi GPU set up and its accessory. The Vudu 2 and its glide API helped 3dfx become a dominant force in the late 1990s. As time went on, we saw improved features and performance from cards like the ati rage series that added DVD acceleration and the matrix mystique, which actually allowed you to add more vram, which you can’t even do on modern cards.
But the game really changed in 1999, when Nvidia previously known for cards like the Riva TNT, released the GeForce 256 aside from it being the first ever GeForce card, it could process complex visuals that were previously left to the CPU, such as lighting effects and transformation, which Maps 3d images onto a regular 2d monitor, although the GeForce 256 was a little ahead of it’s time and many games didn’t support its new features. It set the stage for the GeForce 2, which came out next year and became very popular that same year. However, 3dfx disappeared from the consumer GPU market due to risky business decisions like attempting to manufacture its own cards to go with their GPUs and being unable to keep up with the performance of GeForce and a TI’s new Radeon line.
These two products tax overwhelmed a once crowded GPU market and in 2001, Nvidia and ATI, were the only two real players remaining. Unless, of course, you count Intel’s integrated graphics, although a few smaller companies remained, they gradually exited the consumer market over the next several years. Things continued to heat up in 2001 with the GeForce 3, which included a pixel shader that allowed for much more granular detail, since it could produce effects on a per pixel basis, not to be outdone, ATI quickly.
Added this feature to its second generation of Radeon cards. For a while, after subsequent cards offered incremental performance improvements, though we did see a transition from the old AGP interface to the faster PCI Express interface in 2004, as well as nvidia, sli and ATI crossfire in 2004 and 2005 respectively. But 2006 brought us a couple.
Huge developments ATI was bought out by AMD and NVIDIA rolled out its famous 8800 GTX, an incredibly powerful and power-hungry card that not only had a massive number of transistors but a unified shader. That could handle a large number of effects at once and run at a faster clock than the processing core, as well as a number of stream processors that allowed graphical tasks to be parallelized to improve efficiency. The switch to stream processing allowed not only for a greater performance in games, but also general-purpose or GP GPU computing on graphics cards for things like scientific research and hey Bitcoin mining AMD incorporated similar technology into its Radeon 2000 series.
A short while later AMD was also the first to bring us the concept of surround gaming with up to six monitors at once, with its Eyefinity brand in 2009, with Nvidia following this up in 2010. Of course, 4k came along with both the red and the green team featuring support for it in 2012. We’Ve certainly come a long way since the days of playing pong in black and white and who knows maybe in 40 years, we’ll have something so advanced that Crysis 3 won’t be noticeably harder to render than a ball bouncing around a black screen tunnel.
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