Per The NVIDIA Way [1], the GeForce 256 was branded as "the first GPU" for marketing reasons alone; the actual first GPU was the subsequent GeForce 3 (which introduced programmable shaders):
[Sanford] Russell grabbed Michael Hara for a thirty-minute brainstorm session to figure out how to market the GeForce 256 more effectively, and both executives remember coming out of the room with the notion to call the new chip the first entry in an entirely new product category altogether: a graphics processing unit, or GPU, which would be to graphics rendering what the computer's main central processing unit (CPU) was for all other computational tasks.
Even so, the GPU moniker, when applied first to the GeForce 256, was controversial among Nvidia engineers, who pointed out that a chip could not truly be called a GPU unless it had several features that the GeForce 256 did not. The chip lacked a "state machine," a technical term meaning a dedicated processor that transitions from various states to execute and fetch instructions, in the same manner that a CPU does for programming commands. It was not programmable, meaning that graphics styles and features could not easily be customized by third-party developers. Instead, developers would have to rely on a fixed set of Nvidia-defined hardware functions. Moreover, the GeForce 256 did not have its own programming language.
But the marketing team argued that such features were already planned for the next generation of graphics chips. And even without them, the GeForce 256 delivered a step change in performance that would be obvious to every gamer and computer enthusiast in the world. While not literally a GPU, the GeForce 256 could still be a category-defining product. The chips that would follow-the "true" GPUs that would be fully programmable by outside developers-were coming soon enough.
So Nvidia's marketing team pushed forward with the GPU name over the dissent of Nvidia's engineers. "We don't need anyone's approval," Vivoli told them. He didn't think anyone outside of the industry would really care about the technical definition. Besides, "we knew the next one was going to be programmable. We decided to take a leap, make a stretch that this is a GPU."
In February 2001, Nvidia released the GeForce 3, whose programmable shader technology and support for third-party development of its core graphics functions made it the first true GPU.
AIRC the 256 was the first consumer card with hardware transform and lighting, so it's not wholly dishonest to refer to it as something more substantial than just a triangle rasterizer. Also DirectX didn't support shaders until a year or two later.
Right! The 256 introduced hardware T&L, which was a great advance in capability (but harder to explain than "it's the first GPU"). From the same chapter [1]:
It was incontrovertibly true that the GeForce 256 represented a significant advancement in traditional graphics capabilities, which by this point was typical and expected of every new chip generation Nvidia produced. It featured four graphics pipelines, allowing it to process four pixels at the same time. It also integrated a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, which meant it could take on the calculation tasks essential to the moving, rotation, and scaling of 3-D objects.
Those tasks were usually handled by the CPU; the GeForce 256 thus took even more computational burden off of the CPU and made the entire computer run faster.
"By putting dedicated hardware to do that, you could suddenly process a lot more geometry and make much more interesting pictures," said former chief scientist David Kirk.
The management team at Nvidia thought that this was far too technical to pitch to customers. The typical in-house naming formula of acronym and number wouldn't work. Nvidia needed something bigger to market its new product.
"We had to find a way to position this product as a much better graphics processor for 3-D graphics than anything out there," said Dan Vivoli. "The chip is big. It has texture and lighting. We've got to charge a lot for it. We need to come up with a way to make sure how great this thing is." He challenged his product-marketing team to come up with something brilliant.
Yep, came here to say the same thing. I still remember Carmack presenting Doom3 with the GF3 at the Macworld Expo (Feb 2001) and recall him referring to it as the first true GPU.
Funny, though, that when Doom3 was actually released in 2004 a GF3 wouldn't come anywhere close to playing it at an acceptable framerate (a GeForce 6800 was what you wanted for it in those days).
I played Panzer Dragoon on an NV1-based Diamond Multimedia card at CES in January 1996. nVIDIA gave me an nV1 t-shirt at the time, which I wore periodically for the next 10 years.
First we had video or graphics accelerators, for video, or rendering. Then 2D/3D mentions with different performance or quality became a topic.
Then we got GPUs to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".
Then those were recoined into GPGPU, as in general purpose GPU, when CUDA became an important feature and again to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".
To the best of my recollection, the GeForce 256 was the first one that was marketed as a “GPU” and began to popularize that term in the industry.
Specifically because it did transformation and lighting calcs in (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware, instead of in software on the main CPU.
Yes, NVIDIA made 3D accelerators before the GeForce line. I have many of them in my collection. But (IIRC) it did not market them as “GPUs”. That term wasn’t really used yet.
Got it. Well, to be honest the marketing distinction isn't terribly interesting. But it would still be cool to see how the early GPUs (even if not called that) evolved.
Doing all those calculations in hardware (the distinction the marketing was based on) seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, at least within the context of consumer PC graphics cards. (It had long existed in the high-end workstation space, SGI etc. but the workstation and consumer PC ecosystems were more separated than they are these days.)
Funnily enough, I already “found” that term in my brain and then decided to write “non-programmable” instead, in the hopes of being a bit clearer to readers who don’t know this space and its specialized terms already.
The big feature of the GeForce 256 was hardware offloading of transform and lighting calculations. While it was fixed function it was programmable. This offloaded a pretty significant amount of work from the CPU and lightened the IO load single the math was done on geometry living in the VRAM.
The NV1 and other cards before the GF256 did accelerated drawing and geometry raster but lighting and transformations were done on the CPU in main memory then transferred to VRAM and rasterized.
Even if the GF256 had say the same texel output performance as a TNT2, the T&L running on the GPU would allow for more complex scenes at higher frame rates than a TNT2 doing T&L on the CPU. The GF256 also had better raster performance so for many games it was just a "free" performance upgrade over a TNT2.
Meh my Verite 1000 chip in my Creative 3d blaster was an actual mips processor. You could probably turn it into the worlds slowest ray tracer if you wanted to.
Funny, though, that when Doom3 was actually released in 2004 a GF3 wouldn't come anywhere close to playing it at an acceptable framerate (a GeForce 6800 was what you wanted for it in those days).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1
BTW, did you hear yet NV is stopping production for the 5090 RTX line? - the replacement chip will be 50% the size and transistors.
Then we got GPUs to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".
Then those were recoined into GPGPU, as in general purpose GPU, when CUDA became an important feature and again to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".
Specifically because it did transformation and lighting calcs in (non-programmable until GeForce 3) hardware, instead of in software on the main CPU.
Yes, NVIDIA made 3D accelerators before the GeForce line. I have many of them in my collection. But (IIRC) it did not market them as “GPUs”. That term wasn’t really used yet.
I think the term you're looking for is fixed-function hardware.
But thank you for condescending anyway.
The NV1 and other cards before the GF256 did accelerated drawing and geometry raster but lighting and transformations were done on the CPU in main memory then transferred to VRAM and rasterized.
Even if the GF256 had say the same texel output performance as a TNT2, the T&L running on the GPU would allow for more complex scenes at higher frame rates than a TNT2 doing T&L on the CPU. The GF256 also had better raster performance so for many games it was just a "free" performance upgrade over a TNT2.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/linux-readme-install/