History of GPUs As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,415 words · ~7 min read
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since time immemorial or at least the 1970s there's been a never-ending demand
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for higher quality smoother graphics NVIDIA games but the very earliest gpus
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in game consoles weren't really gpus at all instead of being general purpose
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microprocessors that we see in modern graphics cards earlier video controllers
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were more or less hard coded to only output specific visuals for whatever
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video game it was a part of it wasn't long though before real CPU started to
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appear NVIDIA home game consoles but for years graphics processing in both
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consoles and computers was handled by the CPU itself instead of having a
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separate GPU it wasn't until the mid-1980s that the modern concept of a
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discrete GPU started to take shape including the commodore amiga's graphics
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subsystem that offloaded video tasks from the CPU and texas instruments
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rolling out the very uncreatively named tms-3401
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in 1986 which was among the first of microprocessors specifically designed to
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render graphics on its own but it wasn't until graphical user interfaces on
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computers were popularized by new operating systems like Windows that what
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we think of as pc graphics accelerators on an expansion card really took off
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instead of being relegated only to top-end workstations out of the reach of
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average consumers one particularly popular early video card was the ibm
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8514 a from 1987 which supported 256
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colors and took care of common 2d rendering tasks like drawing lines on
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screens much faster than a regular CPU could handle thanks to its low cost it
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spawned a number of clones and paved the way for further advances in 2d graphics
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it was also around this time that a small canadian company named ati started
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producing its own graphics cards notably the wonder series one of the first
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consumer product lines to support multiple monitors as well as the ability
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to switch between a number of different graphics modes and resolutions which was
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uncommon at the time but these early graphics cards still relied on the main
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CPU for quite a few tasks and as 2d
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graphics became more complex in the early and mid-1990s we started seeing
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more and more powerful gpus that could work more independently of the CPU as
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well as the emergence of open application programming interfaces or
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apis including opengl in 1992 or say
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directx in 1995. these apis enabled
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programmers to write code for them that would work on many different graphics
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adapters really helping to push the gaming industry forward by providing
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somewhat of a standard software platform for game studios of course the real
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excitement in this area was the possibility of bringing 3d graphics to
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home pcs although the 1995 release of
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the original playstation console one of the first to support true 3d graphics
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proved wildly successful the pc side got off to a much slower start one of the
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first 3d cards designed for consumer gaming was the s3 verge also released in
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1995. unfortunately the verge was more of a 2d card with 3d support kind of
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hastily added on and was notoriously so slow to the point where some gamers
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called the verge a graphics decelerator not exactly flattering other cards like
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the 3dfx voodoo from 1996 were actually
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3d only meaning that you need a separate card for day-to-day computing
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but at least the voodoo was notable for being the first ever card to support
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multi-GPU setup and its successor the voodoo 2 and its glide API helped 3dfx
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become a dominant force in the late 1990s as time went on we saw improved
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features and performance from cards like the ati rage series that added dvd
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acceleration and the matrox mystique which actually allowed you to add more
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vram which you can't even do on modern cards
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but the game really changed in 1999 when
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NVIDIA previously known for cards like the riva tnt released the GeForce 256
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aside from it being the first ever GeForce card it could process complex
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visuals that were previously left to the CPU such as lighting effects and
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transformation which maps 3d images onto a regular 2d monitor although the
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GeForce 256 was a little ahead of its time and many games didn't support its
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new features it set the stage for the GeForce 2 which came out next year and
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became very popular that same year however 3dfx disappeared from the
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consumer GPU market due to risky business decisions like attempting to
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manufacture its own cards to go with their gpus and being unable to keep up
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with the performance of GeForce and ati's new Radeon line these two product
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stacks overwhelmed a once crowded GPU market and in 2001 NVIDIA and ati were
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the only two real players remaining unless of course you count Intel's
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integrated graphics although a few smaller companies
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remained they gradually exited the consumer market over the next several
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years things continued to heat up in 2001 with the GeForce 3 which included a
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pixel shader that allowed for much more granular detail since it could produce
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effects on a per pixel basis not to be
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outdone ati quickly added this feature to its second generation of Radeon cards
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for a while after subsequent cards offered incremental performance
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improvements though we did see a transition from the old agp interface to
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the faster pci express interface in 2004
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as well as NVIDIA sli and ati crossfire in 2004 and 2005 respectively but 2006
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brought us a couple huge developments ati was bought out by AMD and NVIDIA
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rolled out its famous 8800 gtx an incredibly powerful and power hungry
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card that not only had a massive number of transistors but a unified shader that
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could handle a large number of effects at once and run at a faster clock than
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the processing core as well as a number of stream processors
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that allowed graphical tasks to be parallelized to improve efficiency the
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switch to stream processing allowed not only for a greater performance in games
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but also general purpose or gp GPU
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computing on graphics cards for things like scientific research and hey bitcoin
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mining AMD incorporated similar technology into its Radeon 2000 series a
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short while later AMD was also the first to bring us the concept of surround
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gaming with up to six monitors at once with its ifinity brand in 2009 with
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NVIDIA following this up in 2010 of course 4k came along with both the red
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and the green team featuring support for it in 2012. we've certainly come a long
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way since the days of playing pong in black and white and who knows maybe in
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40 years we'll have something so advanced that crisis 3 won't be
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noticeably harder to render than a ball bouncing around a black screen
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to tunnelbear.com Linus all right guys thank you for
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watching i know this was a rather long video but it was a history of graphics
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