![]() ![]() The Voodoo1 steered clear of 2D graphics entirely users had to run it together with a separate 2D card. Cards that could only render 2D became obsolete very fast. Previously, the industry was focused on 2D and non-PC architecture, and graphics cards were mostly known by alphanumeric names and huge price tags.ģDFx’s Voodoo graphics card, launched in late 1996, took over about 85% of the market. The history of modern GPUs starts in 1995 with the introduction of the first 3D add-in cards, and later the adoption of the 32-bit operating systems and affordable personal computers. By the end of 1997, this company had nearly 25 percent of the graphics market. Among the winners founded during this time was NVIDIA. ![]() Overall, the early 1990s was the time when a lot of graphics hardware companies were found, and then acquired or ousted out of business. Throughout the 1990s, the level of integration of video cards was significantly improved with the additional application programming interfaces (APIs). This card spawned a crowd of imitators: by 1995, all major players in the making of graphics cards had added 2D acceleration support to their chips. The name was to indicate the performance increase. S3 Graphics introduced the S3 86C911, named after the Porsche 911, in 1991. This company would lead the market for years with its Wonder line of graphics boards and chips. In 1985, three Hong Kong immigrants in Canada formed Array Technology Inc, soon renamed as ATI Technologies. It was able to display eight colors at a resolution of 256x256 or monochrome at 512x512. ISBX 275 Video Graphics Controller Multimodule Board, released by Intel in 1983, was the next revolutionary device. At first, it was 80 columns by 25 lines of text characters or symbols. Not a modern GPU yet, it was a particular computer component designed for one purpose: to display video. In 1981, IBM started using monochrome and a color display adapter (MDA/CDA) in its PCs. Graphics hardware of Namco Galaxian arcade system supported RGB color, multi-colored sprites and tilemap backgrounds as early as 1979. In 1976, RCA built the “Pixie” video chip, which was able to output video signal at 62×128 resolution. Specialized graphics chips were widely used in arcade system boards. They carried out information from the central processor to the display. Although it may be considered the first 3D graphics system, the base of today’s GPUs was formed in the mid-70s with so-called video shifters and video address generators. Arcade boards and display adapters (1951 -1995)Īs early as 1951, MIT built the Whirlwind, a flight simulator for the Navy. Let’s have a look at some milestones in the fascinating history of the GPU. Over several decades, the GPU evolved from a single core, fixed function hardware used for graphics solely, to a set of programmable parallel cores. But modern graphics processing units are engaged in the most complex calculations, like big data research, machine learning and AI. Initially, the purpose of a video card was to take a stream of binary data from the central processor and render images to display. ![]() Today, a GPU is one of the most crucial hardware components of computer architecture.
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