Public domain ↗
NVIDIA GeForce 256
- Year
- 1999
- Creator
- Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem
- Company
- NVIDIA
- Location
- 3535 Monroe Street, Santa Clara, California
- Room
- The Gold Rush ↗
Description
The GeForce 256 is a graphics card with a processor that does graphics calculations. Many people think of it as the first consumer GPU, or graphics processing unit, and it took graphics work from the main processor.
Importance
NVIDIA, founded in April 1993, sold its stock to the public in January 1999 at $12 a share. The GeForce 256 was expensive, but it sold very well. It continued the idea of dedicated graphics hardware that the Silicon Graphics Geometry Engine showed in 1982.
Interesting fact
NVIDIA's own corporate timeline gives 1999 as the year that the company invented the GPU.
Sources
- 1999 | Timeline of Computer History ↗Computer History Museum
- Corporate Timeline ↗NVIDIA
- NVIDIA final IPO prospectus (Form 424B4) ↗U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 1999-01-22