Celebrate the 25th anniversary of 'the first GPU in the world', Nvidia GeForce 120 MHz.

When exactly does a GPU celebrate its birthday? I would argue that a GPU's birthday is the anniversary of its launch date, meaning the GeForce 256 turns 25 today. This little card might not seem like much when compared to the modern GPUs but it is a piece in gaming history that deserves to be celebrated.

Nvidia, who marketed the original SDR version as a GPU, is credited with establishing its place in history and our hearts as the first GPU. Sony was the first to refer to the 32-bit graphics processor in the PS1 as a GPU. But let's not spoil the story.

This little beastie, with its 32 MB of RAM and 120 MHz core clock, was the first GPU to be released. The card in your computer today owes a lot to it.

The GF256 is the first video card that can accelerate the entire process of creating a new frame. This allows developers to experiment with polygon counts, ushering in a whole new generation of gaming.

You could argue that GPUs existed long before Nvidia coined this term. It's not fun. The GeForce 256 was a huge leap in PC gaming.

The "256" is a reference to the QuadPipe Rendering Engine, which is a 256-bit rendering engine, consisting of 4 64-bit pixel pipes on the NV10 processor running at 120 MHz. This results in 480 Mpix/sec. It also had a TV-out feature, hardware alpha blending, and was compliant with 1080i.

The GeForce was up to 50% faster in hardware T&L enabled games than the Voodoo3 or Nvidia TNT2 Ultra.

Look at that tiny little cooler! I remember when new hardware was equipped with tiny screaming fans. We were grateful for the good stuff.

All joking aside, it was a big release at the time. It was quickly followed by another DDR model, released on December 13, 1999, with similar specs but with double data rate memory. Below are the specs for both, so that we can marvel at their beauty.

It's refreshing to see the 13/12 W TDP rating in light of all the recent noise about the upcoming Nvidia Power Requirements. Check out the transistor count. In the past, 17 million transistors seemed like a lot, but a RTX 4090 today has over 76 billion. It's still nice to see the progress we've made over the past 25 years.

What were we playing back then? In 1999, the first Unreal Tournament was launched on 30 November. This was just in time for the GeForce wave. Quake III arena was released just two days later. This was the perfect time to play multiplayer first-person shooting games with your shiny Nvidia hardware.

Heady times indeed. I'm sure that if you look in my parents' attic, there's a GPU still lurking in the back of the box. After spending the afternoon immersing myself in GPU nostalgia I feel the need to rescue it from its dusty grave and mount it on my wall.

I just spoke to my partner and we will not be doing that. Shame. If you have one lying around, now might be the time to give it some sunshine. All it needs is a small cake, a lit candle, and an official ceremony. GeForce 256, I salute you. We didn't realize how good things were.