25 years ago, Nvidia changed PCs forever

By Jacob Roach Published October 11, 2024

Twenty-five years ago, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 and changed the face of PCs forever. It wasn’t the first graphics card produced by Nvidia — it was actually the sixth — but it was the first that really put gaming at the center of Nvidia’s lineup with GeForce branding, and it’s the device that Nvidia coined the term “GPU” with.

Nvidia is celebrating the anniversary of the release, and rightfully so. We’ve come an unbelievable way from the GeForce 256 up to the RTX 4090, but Nvidia’s first GPU wasn’t met with much enthusiasm. The original release, which lines up with today’s date, was for the GeForce 256 SDR, or single data rate. Later in 1999, Nvidia followed up with the GeForce 256 DDR, or dual data rate.

Anandtech (rest in peace) is one of the few publications that still has a review of the GeForce 256 live, and it’s a fascinating looking back at the expectations in 1999. The author — founding member Anand Lal Shimpi — writes that Nvidia “cutely dubbed their GPU” when referring to the GeForce brand. Now, it’s hard to think of a PC hardware market without the term “GPU.”

For as much that has changed in 25 years, some things have stayed the same. The review heavily criticizes Nvidia’s limited memory bandwidth on the original GeForce 256 — I’m looking at you, RTX 4060 Ti — and Nvidia’s high pricing for a “single peripheral.” At the time, the GeForce 256 started at $249. Those are still the criticisms Nvidia faces today with its graphics cards.

Although you shouldn’t look at the GeForce 256 through rose-tinted glasses, Nvidia deserves its flowers. Looking back at the review, Nvidia is the only company that has survived in the graphics space since 1999, with brands like 3dfx and Diamond being swallowed up. ATI is still around, technically, though in a much different form under the leadership of AMD.

There’s a strong chance PC gaming wouldn’t be where it is today without the GeForce 256 — be it for better or worse. As we all eagerly await the release of Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs, rock your PC like it’s 1999 and boot up Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament at 480p to see what gamers with the GeForce 256 experienced at release.

That’s certainly what Nvidia is doing. In celebration, the company says it’ll be posting mock ads styled like they were released in 1999, complete with sleeper PC build rocking an RTX 4080 Super, on social media. You can see a snippet of one Nvidia shared early above.