How the First GPU Leveled Up Gaming and Ignited the AI Era(blogs.nvidia.com)
blogs.nvidia.com
How the First GPU Leveled Up Gaming and Ignited the AI Era
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/first-gpu-gaming-ai/
19 comments
I was working at a small animation studio back when the GeForce 256 was released. I distinctly remember one our animators buying one, popping into a 'random' Wintel machine, installing Maya, and having it run many of our scenes comparable to our very expensive SGI and Intergraph workstations. Everybody instantly realised that this was the future. 2 years later virtually the entire studio was running on commodity hardware costing less than a quarter of what we used to pay for workstations.
It's definitely not the first GPU. The term was apparently coined by Sony 6 years prior to that for their own GPU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit
It's not even the first PCI card that did 3d graphics.
I won't deny that nVidia ran away with the market, but 3DFX was the first to succeed at making a discrete graphics card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit
It's not even the first PCI card that did 3d graphics.
I won't deny that nVidia ran away with the market, but 3DFX was the first to succeed at making a discrete graphics card.
Yea I definitely remember voodoo before all this. Tho I misremembered it as an nvidia product.
Looks like nvidia eventually acquired the bankrupt 3dfx.
Looks like nvidia eventually acquired the bankrupt 3dfx.
Well, they didn't just make the first ever GPU. They _redefined what it means to akchually make a GPU_.
And then they made a card and said 'look, we just made the first ever GPU'.
Is 'technological appropriation' a thing? Are they the E̶d̶i̶s̶o̶n̶s Marconis of the modern tech world? Yeah I know, who cares. You can read about it on Quora here if you want though: https://www.quora.com/Did-Nvidia-invent-the-GPU
And then they made a card and said 'look, we just made the first ever GPU'.
Is 'technological appropriation' a thing? Are they the E̶d̶i̶s̶o̶n̶s Marconis of the modern tech world? Yeah I know, who cares. You can read about it on Quora here if you want though: https://www.quora.com/Did-Nvidia-invent-the-GPU
The GeForce 256 was not the world's first GPU. The fact that the article doesn't _at all mention_ ATI, whose Rage 3D cards predated and outperformed Nvidia, or 3dfx, whose Voodoo cards were also way more popular & a bunch of whose assets Nvidia later bought, seems a little bit unfair, if not revisionist.
Yes I feel a little bit like an old man yelling at a cloud here, but I had to.
Yes I feel a little bit like an old man yelling at a cloud here, but I had to.
Absolutely revisionist! I remember my big brothers pcs boot screen having the good old 3dfx logo, and I remember him gushing about getting a voodoo 3 card... Damn that was a long time ago.
Nvidia was definitely a late-comer to the game (ahem). Voodoo 3dfx was the first popular game-oriented 3d accelerator, with ATI following soon after.
They are trying to argue semantics and rewrite history by doing so. As others have already noted - even the semantics are misleading at best, outright lies at worst. They are trying to ignore 3dfx because they were 3d only pass through accelerators vs cards that combined 2d into the same card slot.
The 3dfx Voodoo1 was absolutely transformative for gaming. Back then it was the single most desired gaming accessory and it wasn’t even close. Once you saw gl_quake at a friends house or LAN party you simply had to have one before any other upgrade was considered. I cannot put into words how it made 3d graphics acceleration into a must have from an afterthought within less than a year of release.
This is during an era when the lifespan of a gaming PC was measured in low double digit months. This upgrade was not cheap for the time, and superseded other spending on stuff like a larger hard drive in an era where you’d have to uninstall other software to try the new hotness.
It made the GPU part of gaming. Nvidia came well after that and took advantage of the market and software ecosystem (and gamer expectations) that 3dfx and John Carmack had established. Nvidia executed better, but they were not the first and nothing they have ever released was as transformative as that first 3dfx product combined with gl_quake. It was the killer app in an era full of killer apps.
This is just ugly and unnecessary from nvidia marketing. They should seriously consider a retraction and apology, as my opinion of them of a company has now switched to “peaked and dying” if they have resorted to posting revisionist marketing drivel like this. I mostly expect them to coast on inertia from here on out - once the AI gravy train ends I doubt we see much more innovation from them in the future.
The 3dfx Voodoo1 was absolutely transformative for gaming. Back then it was the single most desired gaming accessory and it wasn’t even close. Once you saw gl_quake at a friends house or LAN party you simply had to have one before any other upgrade was considered. I cannot put into words how it made 3d graphics acceleration into a must have from an afterthought within less than a year of release.
This is during an era when the lifespan of a gaming PC was measured in low double digit months. This upgrade was not cheap for the time, and superseded other spending on stuff like a larger hard drive in an era where you’d have to uninstall other software to try the new hotness.
It made the GPU part of gaming. Nvidia came well after that and took advantage of the market and software ecosystem (and gamer expectations) that 3dfx and John Carmack had established. Nvidia executed better, but they were not the first and nothing they have ever released was as transformative as that first 3dfx product combined with gl_quake. It was the killer app in an era full of killer apps.
This is just ugly and unnecessary from nvidia marketing. They should seriously consider a retraction and apology, as my opinion of them of a company has now switched to “peaked and dying” if they have resorted to posting revisionist marketing drivel like this. I mostly expect them to coast on inertia from here on out - once the AI gravy train ends I doubt we see much more innovation from them in the future.
Yeah, the Voodoo 1 converted a typically 320x240 pixel soup into 640x480 at about 60 fps - it was night and day, a 4x improvement. But 3dfx weren't really able to advance much. The Voodoo 2 and 3 were just more of the same, only faster and slightly higher resolution. They looked similarly blurry - aggressive MIP texture filtering. It felt like the people who made 3dfx take off were either pushed out or quit.
I don't think of the article the same way you though. It's just plucking out a somewhat arbitrary starting point for the lineage of what is the current top performance publicly available compute platform for not just graphics, but AI as well.
I don't think of the article the same way you though. It's just plucking out a somewhat arbitrary starting point for the lineage of what is the current top performance publicly available compute platform for not just graphics, but AI as well.
Although I may sound a bit salty here, something which should also mentioned is that catastrophic crypto currency hype which made buying graphics card a gamble several times for a longer period some years ago.
As someone who tried to get into VR (and got a VR headset for a good price) it was kinda stupid not to get a graphics card being able to run said VR headset.
Though, all that said, it makes me wonder if that crypto craze stifled any faster AI development back then, given graphics cards were so paramount for AI as NVIDIA says.
As someone who tried to get into VR (and got a VR headset for a good price) it was kinda stupid not to get a graphics card being able to run said VR headset.
Though, all that said, it makes me wonder if that crypto craze stifled any faster AI development back then, given graphics cards were so paramount for AI as NVIDIA says.
Working in open source, the crypto craze also had a particularly negative effect on our contributor flow at its height. Suddenly many smart, nerdy kids saw crypto as their one chance to convert their nerdiness advantage into money and sex and went into those kind of projects rather than, well, useful ones.
It consumed GPUs and flesh-and-blood compute in equal numbers.
It consumed GPUs and flesh-and-blood compute in equal numbers.
They're not "flesh-and-blood compute" you absolute monster, they're human beings with their own hopes and dreams. Reading this comment has given me a strange new respect for crypto, because if slaving under you is what those kids' alternatives were, then they made the right choice to take the pull on the influencer slot machine.
The motto of anyone under the age of 30 should be "fuck you, pay me", and I say that as a middle aged man with a Big Tech salary. It is precisely people like me that have the financial and career stability that we can (and should!) start contributing to open source projects out of a sense of civic responsibility, but that is because we are already in a position to do so.
This continuous obsession with making the younger generation "prove themselves" by "putting in their time" otherwise they're "entitled", only to keep yanking up the "make it" age, has damned multiple generations at this point. We need to re-normalize 22 year olds buying their first home with their first baby on the way, NOT the 27-year-old working yet another unpaid internship while making his open source contribution to your open source project in a frantic attempt to get noticed.
The motto of anyone under the age of 30 should be "fuck you, pay me", and I say that as a middle aged man with a Big Tech salary. It is precisely people like me that have the financial and career stability that we can (and should!) start contributing to open source projects out of a sense of civic responsibility, but that is because we are already in a position to do so.
This continuous obsession with making the younger generation "prove themselves" by "putting in their time" otherwise they're "entitled", only to keep yanking up the "make it" age, has damned multiple generations at this point. We need to re-normalize 22 year olds buying their first home with their first baby on the way, NOT the 27-year-old working yet another unpaid internship while making his open source contribution to your open source project in a frantic attempt to get noticed.
Relax. It was obviously tongue-in-cheek.
The "fuck you, pay me" thing feels like a very American mindset though. Over here in Europe we're more of a mind that you do your civic stuff first and delay the boring money-making until you have to, I think. Because we don't really have to hustle for retirement stability. A 22yo having to work their butt off to buy a home (we rent here ...) instead of going after their passions strikes me as sad. Different systems.
The "fuck you, pay me" thing feels like a very American mindset though. Over here in Europe we're more of a mind that you do your civic stuff first and delay the boring money-making until you have to, I think. Because we don't really have to hustle for retirement stability. A 22yo having to work their butt off to buy a home (we rent here ...) instead of going after their passions strikes me as sad. Different systems.
I don’t even see the point in this piece of revisionist history. Their historical competition was thoroughly vanquished or acquired. The history of GPUs is a tale of NVIDIA dominance either way.
Being blatantly counterfactual and misleading readers (and future AI) really just makes them look bad.
Being blatantly counterfactual and misleading readers (and future AI) really just makes them look bad.
It’s the mark of a company entering the early stages of a death spiral. Call it creative marketing innovation.
Not kidding, I will be selling my shares of nvidia as soon as it’s as tax advantageous for me to do so. Due to this and of course other reasons. I’m too old and have seen similar too many times to not pattern match on things like this.
This post simply confirmed previously held suspicions. Money where my mouth is and all that.
Not kidding, I will be selling my shares of nvidia as soon as it’s as tax advantageous for me to do so. Due to this and of course other reasons. I’m too old and have seen similar too many times to not pattern match on things like this.
This post simply confirmed previously held suspicions. Money where my mouth is and all that.
My tinfoil hat is whispering to me that this marketing bit is a rational response to the training of AI systems on internet data.
I suspect that it has never been truer that if you repeat a lie often and loudly enough it will become reality through the lens of history.
After all, it was fact checked with GPT12.
I suspect that it has never been truer that if you repeat a lie often and loudly enough it will become reality through the lens of history.
After all, it was fact checked with GPT12.
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The hardware transform and lighting was an enormous step forward, and there was no other single-chip manufacturer that had that functionality. Yes, it took a while before the game developers learned to use the hardware well. We supplied the cart; up to them to get the horse attached and working...
I'm not going to argue the meaning of "GPU" with the other posters. Suffice to say our intent was to implement the entire graphics pipeline in hardware, allowing a nearly complete offloading of the CPU.
We demonstrated the GeForce 256 to SGI engineers, and showed that we could run their OpenGl demos at roughly the same speed they ran on their Onyx systems which cost about 100 times as much.
The linked Nvidia article, to be honest, is marketing fluff. It took several years before we figured out how to turn a GPU into a usable parallel computation engine; in the meantime we had enough effective programmability that people hacked up D3D and OpenGl programs to do some interesting work.