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Conina on 05 February 2022
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Captain_Yuri said:

DF Retro: The Story of Nvidia GeForce 256 - The Original 'GPU' [Sponsored]

Now this isn't technically the first GPU but I'll quote a user from gaf as he has a good explanation:
At the time, these cards were called just graphics accelerators. We were still at a time when most games could run in software mode. But if you had a card like these, those certain graphic's functions would be accelerated. Hence the name. nVidia was the first to market the term GPU. Mind you this was not a technical term, just a marketing gimmick. But it stuck, and now all graphics cards are called GPUs. And nVidia defined that only cards that had T&L could be called GPUs. Once again, this was just a marketing gimmick to differentiate the Geforce from the competition. ATI tried to counter with the term VPU, Visual processing Unit. But it never caught on.

Good times! The yearly GPU improvements were awesome these days.

I got the DDR-model of the GeForce 256 back then.