The GeForce 256 is the original release in
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
's "
GeForce" product-line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor (
RIVA TNT2) by increasing the number of fixed
pixel pipelines, offloading host geometry calculations to a
hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, and adding hardware
motion compensation
Motion compensation in computing, is an algorithmic technique used to predict a frame in a video, given the previous and/or future frames by accounting for motion of the camera and/or objects in the video. It is employed in the encoding of video d ...
for
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...
video. It offered a notably large leap in 3D
PC gaming performance and was the first fully
Direct3D 7-compliant 3D accelerator.
The chip was manufactured by
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
using its
220 nm CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSF ...
process.
There are two versions of the GeForce 256 the SDR version released in October 1999 and the DDR version released in mid-December 1999 each with a different type of
SDRAM
Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (synchronous dynamic RAM or SDRAM) is any DRAM where the operation of its external pin interface is coordinated by an externally supplied clock signal.
DRAM integrated circuits (ICs) produced from the ...
memory. The SDR version uses
SDR SDRAM memory from
Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of the Samsung chaebol, acc ...
, while the later DDR version uses
DDR SDRAM memory from
Hyundai Electronics (now
SK Hynix
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker (after Samsung Electronics) and the world's third-largest semiconductor company. ...
).
Architecture
GeForce 256 was marketed as "the world's first 'GPU', or
Graphics Processing Unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, m ...
", a term Nvidia defined at the time as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second".
The "256" in its name stems from the "256-bit QuadPipe Rendering Engine", a term describing the four 64-bit pixel pipelines of the NV10 chip. In single-textured games NV10 could put out 4 pixels per cycle, while a two-textured scenario would limit this to 2 multitextured pixels per cycle, as the chip still had only one TMU per pipeline, just as TNT2.
In terms of rendering features, GeForce 256 also added support for
cube environment mapping and
dot-product (Dot3) bump mapping.
The integration of the transform and lighting hardware into the GPU itself set the GeForce 256 apart from older 3D accelerators that relied on the CPU to perform these calculations (also known as software transform and lighting). This reduction of 3D graphics solution complexity brought the cost of such hardware to a new low and made it accessible to cheap consumer graphics cards instead of being limited to the previous expensive professionally oriented niche designed for
computer-aided design
Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve co ...
(CAD). NV10's T&L engine also allowed Nvidia to enter the CAD market with dedicated cards for the first time, with a product called
Quadro. The Quadro line uses the same silicon chips as the GeForce cards, but has different driver support and certifications tailored to the unique requirements of CAD applications.
Product comparisons
Compared to previous high-end 3D game accelerators, such as
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 and
Nvidia RIVA TNT2 Ultra, GeForce provided up to a 50% or greater improvement in frame rate in some games (ones specifically written to take advantage of the hardware T&L) when coupled with a very-low-budget CPU. The later release and widespread adoption of GeForce 2 MX/4 MX cards with the same feature set meant unusually long support for the GeForce 256, until approximately 2006, in games such as
Star Wars: Empire at War or
Half-Life 2, the latter of which featured a Direct3D 7 path, targeting the fixed-function pipeline of these GPUs.
Without broad application support at the time, critics pointed out that the T&L technology had little real-world value. Initially, it was only somewhat beneficial in certain situations in a few OpenGL-based 3D
first-person shooter
First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the p ...
s, most notably ''
Quake III Arena''. Benchmarks using low-budget CPUs like the Celeron 300A would give favourable results for the GeForce 256, but benchmarks done with some CPUs such as the Pentium II 300 would give better results with some older graphics cards like the
3dfx Voodoo 2.
3dfx
3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the l ...
and other competing graphics-card companies pointed out that a fast CPU could more than make up for the lack of a T&L unit. Software support for hardware T&L was not commonplace until several years after the release of the first GeForce. Early drivers were buggy and slow, while 3dfx cards enjoyed efficient, high-speed, mature
Glide API and/or
MiniGL support for the majority of games. Only after the GeForce 256 was replaced by the
GeForce 2, and ATI's T&L-equipped
Radeon
Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tech ...
was also on the market, did hardware T&L become a widely utilized feature in games.
The GeForce 256 was also quite expensive for the time and didn't offer tangible advantages over competitors' products outside of 3D acceleration. For example, its GUI and video playback acceleration were not significantly better than that offered by competition or even older Nvidia products. Additionally, some GeForce cards were plagued with poor analog signal circuitry, which caused display output to be blurry.
As CPUs became faster, the GeForce 256 demonstrated that the disadvantage of hardware T&L is that, if a CPU is fast enough, it can perform T&L functions faster than the GPU, thus making the GPU a hindrance to rendering performance. This changed the way the graphics market functioned, encouraging shorter graphics-card lifetimes and placing less emphasis on the CPU for gaming.
Motion compensation
The GeForce 256 introduced
motion compensation
Motion compensation in computing, is an algorithmic technique used to predict a frame in a video, given the previous and/or future frames by accounting for motion of the camera and/or objects in the video. It is employed in the encoding of video d ...
as a functional unit of the NV10 chip,
this first-generation unit would be succeeded by Nvidia's HDVP (High-Definition Video Processor) in GeForce 2 GTS.
Specifications
Discontinued support
NVIDIA has ceased driver support for the GeForce 256 series.
Final drivers include
* Windows 9x & Windows Me: 71.84 released on March 11, 2005
Download
* Windows 2000 & 32-bit Windows XP: 71.89 released on April 14, 2005
* The Windows 2000/XP drivers may be installed on later versions of Windows, such as Windows 7. They do not support the "Aero"-effects of Windows 7, however.
Competitors
*
ATI Rage 128 and
Rage Fury MAXX
*
3dfx Voodoo3
*
Matrox G400
The G400 is a video card made by Matrox, released in September 1999. The graphics processor contains a 2D GUI, video, and Direct3D 6.0 3D accelerator. Codenamed " Toucan", it was a more powerful and refined version of its predecessor, the G200.
...
*
S3 Savage 2000
See also
*
Graphics card
A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...
*
Graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, m ...
*
List of Nvidia graphics processing units
References
External links
NVIDIA: GeForce 256 – The World's First GPU from web archivetechPowerUp! GPU Database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Geforce 256
Computer-related introductions in 1999
Nvidia graphics processors
Graphics cards