First dedicated GPU

[sudorc]

Hello,
i was looking for the first dedicated gpu for a little project im doing... ive found so far that NVidia was the company. was there a specific guy that made the first one... if so what was the very first dedicated GPU.

 

[cjl]

What do you consider to be a GPU?

This could qualify for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC

Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Graphics_Controller

Or the 3dfx voodoo

It's true that more capable cards came later, but I wouldn't consider anything later than the Voodoo to be the first dedicated GPU.

 

[sudorc]

the one like the 3dfx voodoo... a dedicated card and one that doesn't look necessarily like a CPU.

 

[megamanx00]

I believe the term "first GPU" was coined often for the GeForce 256 because it moved alot of the calculations for transformation and lighting to the GPU. Even so this "GPU" was mostly a fixed function device. The original Radeon, and it's competitor the GeForce 2, had the beginnings of very simple shaders. Those chips fall short of what is required for pixel shader 1.0 though so they were never used. The first chips with programmable pixel shaders were the GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500.

 

[megamanx00]

I should mention that the GeForce did have some programmable functionality that was never really documented or used. The GeForce 2 did have a primitive pixel shader that was an advance of that, but again it fell short of pixel shader 1.0 so it was also never used.

 

[sudorc]

this will do fine thank you. Its good enough to trick my Over 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! year old English teacher.