GeForce 256 made a significant improvement in the performance of games that used the OpenGL engine, such as Quake III. The success of this graphics card was mainly related to its performance in popular shooter games such as Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament (UT). Its impact was immediately felt and the sale of this product exceeded one million units in the first few months. This early success laid the foundation for Nvidia’s future dominance of the GPU market.
Over the past 25 years, Nvidia has overcome many challenges and celebrated many successes. The GeForce brand has evolved through various versions such as GeForce GT, GTS, GTX and finally the current RTX series.
In recent years, Nvidia has evolved from a gaming hardware provider to a software player and more recently a server provider. The company is now at the forefront of AI-accelerated computing, offering AI technologies in both user-centric and business solutions.
Nvidia
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of GeForce 256, Nvidia has presented computers with a classic design inspired by the years 2000-1999. These systems are equipped with modern components such as Nvidia RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card and Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor and will be presented as part of the competitions that Nvidia organizes on social networks such as TikTok, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.
The evolution of Nvidia GPUs is clear when comparing the original GeForce 256 with the current flagship of this technology giant, the RTX 4090:
|
Feature |
GeForce 256 (1999) |
GeForce RTX 4090 (2022) |
|---|---|---|
|
architecture |
Celsius |
Ada Lovelace |
|
manufacturing process |
TSMC 220nm |
TSMC 4N |
|
Number of transistors |
17 million |
76.3 billion |
|
GPU cores |
Four Pixel Shaders |
16,384 CUDA |
|
GPU frequency |
120 MHz |
2520 MHz |
|
Memory bus |
128 bits |
384 bits |
|
Memory type |
SDR/DDR |
GDDR6X |
|
Memory capacity |
32 MB |
24 GB |
|
Memory bandwidth |
4.8 GB/s |
1,001 gigabytes per second |
|
power consumption |
50 watts |
450 watts |
|
Connection interface |
AGP 4x |
PCIe x16 |
|
Price at the time of supply |
$199 |
$1,599 |
|
Release date |
December 1999 |
October 2022 |
Comparison of the specifications of GeForce 256 with RTX 4090
