In 1999, fans lined up at Blockbuster to rent chunky VHS tapes of The Matrix. Y2K preppers hoarded cash and canned Spam, fearing a worldwide computer crash. Teens gleefully downloaded Britney Spears and Eminem on Napster.
But amid the caffeinated fizz of turn-of-the-millennium tech culture, something more transformative was unfolding.
The release of NVIDIA’s GeForce 256 twenty-five years ago today, overlooked by all but hardcore PC gamers and tech enthusiasts at the time, would go on to lay the foundation for today’s generative AI.
The GeForce 256 wasn’t just another graphics card — it was introduced as the world’s first GPU, setting the stage for future advancements in both gaming and computing.
With hardware transform and lighting (T&L), it took the load off the CPU, a pivotal advancement. As Tom’s Hardware emphasised: “[The GeForce 256] can take the strain off the CPU, keep the 3D-pipeline from stalling, and allow game developers to use much more polygons, which automatically results in greatly increased detail.”
Where Gaming Changed Forever
For gamers, starting up Quake III Arena on a GeForce 256 was a revelation. “Immediately after firing up your favorite game, it feels like you’ve never even seen the title before this moment,” as the enthusiasts at AnandTech put it.
The GeForce 256 paired beautifully with breakthrough titles such Unreal Tournament, one of the first games with realistic reflections, which would go on to sell more than 1 million copies in its first year.
Over the next quarter-century, the collaboration between game developers and NVIDIA would continue to push boundaries, driving advancements such as increasingly realistic textures, dynamic lighting, and smoother frame rates — innovations that delivered far more than just immersive experiences for gamers.
NVIDIA’s GPUs evolved into a platform that transformed new silicon and software into powerful, visceral innovations that reshaped the gaming landscape.
In the decades to come, NVIDIA GPUs drove ever higher frame rates and visual fidelity, allowing for smoother, more responsive gameplay.
This leap in performance was embraced by platforms such as Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Facebook, as gamers were able to stream content with incredible clarity and speed.
These performance boosts not only transformed the gaming experience but also turned players into entertainers. This helped fuel the global growth of esports.
Major events like The International (Dota 2), the League of Legends World Championship, and the Fortnite World Cup attracted millions of viewers, solidifying esports as a global phenomenon and creating new opportunities for competitive gaming.
From Gaming to AI: The GPU’s Next Frontier
As gaming worlds grew in complexity, so too did the computational demands.
The parallel power that transformed gaming graphics caught the attention of researchers, who realised these GPUs could also unlock massive computational potential in AI, enabling breakthroughs far beyond the gaming world.
Deep learning — a software model that relies on billions of neurons and trillions of connections — requires immense computational power.
Traditional CPUs, designed for sequential tasks, couldn’t efficiently handle this workload. But GPUs, with their massively parallel architecture, were perfect for the job.
By 2011, AI researchers had discovered NVIDIA GPUs and their ability to handle deep learning’s immense processing needs.
Researchers at Google, Stanford and New York University began using NVIDIA GPUs to
accelerate AI development, achieving performance that previously required supercomputers.
In 2012, a breakthrough came when Alex Krizhevsky from the University of Toronto used NVIDIA GPUs to win the ImageNet image recognition competition. His neural network, AlexNet, trained on a million images, and crushed the competition, beating handcrafted software written by vision experts.
This marked a seismic shift in technology. What once seemed like science fiction — computers learning and adapting from vast amounts of data — was now a reality, driven by the raw power of GPUs.
By 2015, AI had reached superhuman levels of perception, with Google, Microsoft and Baidu surpassing human performance in tasks like image recognition and speech understanding — all powered by deep neural networks running on GPUs.
In 2016, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang donated the first NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer — a system packed with eight cutting-edge GPUs — to OpenAI, which would harness GPUs to train ChatGPT, launched in November 2022.
In 2018, NVIDIA debuted 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, bringing cinematic realism to gaming visuals and AI-powered features like NVIDIA DLSS, which enhanced gaming performance by leveraging deep learning.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT, launched in 2022, would go on to reach more than 100 million users within months of its launch, demonstrating how NVIDIA GPUs continue to drive the transformative power of generative AI.
Today, GPUs aren’t only 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 immortalised in custom PC builds and digital fan art.
Shaping the Future
This revolution that began with the GeForce 256 continues to unfold today in gaming and entertainment, in personal computing where AI powered by NVIDIA GPUs is now part of everyday life — and inside the trillion-dollar industries building next-generation AI into the core of their businesses.
GPUs are not just enhancing gaming but are designing the future of AI itself.
And now, with innovations like NVIDIA DLSS, which uses AI to boost gaming performance and deliver sharper images, and NVIDIA ACE, designed to bring more lifelike interactions to in-game characters, AI is once again reshaping the gaming world.
The GeForce 256 laid the bedrock for a future where gaming, computing, and AI are not just evolving — together, they’re transforming the world.
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