GeForce 256
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The GeForce 256 was the first of NVIDIA's "GeForce" product-line. Released in August 1999, the Geforce 256 improved on its predecessor (Riva TNT2) by increasing the number of fixed pixel-pipelines, offloading host geometry calculations to a hardware transform and lighting engine, and adding hardware motion-compensation for MPEG-2 video. With its industry-leading 3D feature-set and rendering-speed, the Geforce 256 cemented NVIDIA's position as a key figure in the PC graphics industry. NVIDIA's success came at the expense of 3Dfx, Matrox, and S3 Graphics. One year after the Geforce 256's introduction, only ATI would remain in direct competition with NVIDIA, in the discrete graphics-chipset market.
Although it was the first PC graphics card with hardware T&L, the Geforce 256 was criticized for this very feature. Without broad application support, critics contended the technology had little real-world value. In hindsight, application support for hardware T&L did not become widespread for many months, by which time the Geforce 256 was nearing obsolescence. But it is worth noting that some three years after the GeForce 256's introduction, game developers began to treat hardware T&L as a common feature in cards, i.e. one not limited to a minority of the market. As of 2005, hardware T&L is a baseline requirement for many current games. This gives an indication of the pace of progress in the computer industry.
Specifications:
- Core Clock: 120 MHz
- Memory Clock: 166 MHz (150 MHz for DDR SDRAM version)
- Graphics Core: 256-bit
- Memory Interface: 128-bit
- Triangles per Second: 15 million
- Pixels Per Second: 480 million
- Memory: Up to 128MiB (but the common configuration was 32MB)
External links
- NVIDIA: GeForce 256 - The World's First GPU (http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce256.html)