Nvidia has commemorated the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256 with a lengthy write-up reflecting on the graphics card's transformative role in the company's history, as well as numerous industries. The move also saw Nvidia tease some of its future AI plans, all of which can be traced back to the seminal GPU.
The GeForce 256 was first revealed on August 31, 1999, before hitting the market on October 11. It was touted as "the world's first GPU," promising to offer accelerated graphics-based processing that would solve a wide variety of computational problems. Nvidia saw video games as the killer app for marketing its new product family at the time, not least because gaming was both computationally challenging and looked like it was developing into a humongous industry.
A couple of recent rumors provide alleged pricing details and specs for Nvidia's upcoming RTX 5000 series of graphics cards.
A quarter of a century later, Nvidia has become the world's second-most valuable company, boasting a market cap of $3.3 trillion as of October 2024, which puts it above technology giants such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. Its meteoric rise can largely be traced back to the...