NVIDIA GeForce 256 aka 'world's first GPU' is now 25 years old: released on October 11, 1999

NVIDIA launched the 'world's first GPU' with the release of the GeForce 256 back on October 11, 1999 after announcing the card on August 31, 1999. It's now 25 years old. Wow.

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NVIDIA changed the entire industry -- technology and gaming -- with the release of the GeForce 256, fast-forwarding to today and the "little-known brand" reached a milestone $3.3 trillion market cap and has been leading the charge in gaming and AI for years.

The GeForce 256 at the time introduced hardware transform and lighting (T&L) features directly into the GPU, previously these calculations were run on the CPU or required dedicated hardware (like everything did back in the 90s: sound cards, networking cards, graphic cards, MPEG2 decoder cards, and more). NVIDIA introduced the 'world's first GPU' with the GeForce 256, and the rest is history.

At the time, NVIDIA launched two SKUs of the GeForce 256: one with SDR memory (Single Data Rate) and the other with DDR memory (Double Data Rate). Inside, it featured the NV10 GPU with 23 million transistors on the 220nm process node. Since then, we've come a long way: the GeForce RTX 4090 features the AD102 GPU with 76 billion transistors on the 4nm process node.

• Read more: NVIDIA's next-gen Turing GPU: Biggest Leap Since GeForce 256
• Read more: NVIDIA is a 'little-known brand' after hitting $3.3T market cap, according to consulting firm

NVIDIA's GeForce 256 had 32MB of VRAM on a 128-bit memory bus with up to 4.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth, while the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 has 24GB of VRAM on a 384-bit memory bus with up to 1008GB/sec (1TB/sec+). The GeForce 256 had a 50W TDP, while the GeForce RTX 4090 has a 450W+ TDP.

This means that the GPU transistor count between the GeForce 256 and GeForce RTX 4090 is a difference of 3300x while the VRAM capacity has blown up by 768,000x.

NVIDIA's GeForce 256 graphics card was life-changing for me at the time as a 16-year-old enthusiast, where I upgraded from my 3dfx Voodoo graphics card setup to the GeForce 256 DDR for Quake III Arena at the time. Seeing 32-bit color and having all that juicy performance... was profound as a 90s gamer on the PC.

So much so that I changed my online handle to "anthony256" and it has followed me for 25+ years now, my X handle is anthony256, my gaming handle is anthony256, and my NAS, router, are all 'nas256' and 'router256' and so on.