since time immemorial or at least the 1970s there's been a never-ending demand
for higher quality smoother graphics NVIDIA 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 NVIDIA 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 until the mid-1980s that the modern concept of a
discrete GPU started to take shape including the commodore amiga's graphics
subsystem that offloaded video tasks from the CPU and texas instruments
rolling out the very uncreatively named tms-3401
in 1986 which was among the first of microprocessors 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
8514 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 as 2d
graphics became more complex in the early and 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
apis including opengl in 1992 or say
directx in 1995. these apis 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 decelerator not exactly flattering other cards like
the 3dfx voodoo from 1996 were actually
3d only meaning that you need a separate card for day-to-day computing
but at least the voodoo was notable for being the first ever card to support
multi-GPU setup and its successor the voodoo 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 matrox 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 its 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 ati's new Radeon line these two product
stacks 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 ifinity 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 crisis 3 won't be
noticeably harder to render than a ball bouncing around a black screen
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watching i know this was a rather long video but it was a history of graphics
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