49 GPUs That Defined 30 Years of Gaming
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- The visualization features 49 GPUs spanning 30 years and 92 billion peak transistors, organized into six eras from 1996's 'Pioneering Era' through the current RTX generation.
- 3dfx Voodoo Graphics launched in 1996 at $299 as the first consumer 3D accelerator to gain mass adoption, requiring a separate 2D card connected via pass-through VGA.
- NVIDIA's GeForce 256 DDR (1999, $279) coined the term 'Graphics Processing Unit,' marketed as 'the world's first GPU.'
- ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro (2002) dethroned NVIDIA with the first DirectX 9.0 GPU and a 256-bit bus, while NVIDIA was still on 128-bit.
- AMD acquired ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006 — the same year NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX introduced unified shaders, DirectX 10, CUDA, and the 'Can it run Crysis?' meme.
- The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (2003) earned the 'Dustbuster' nickname for a cooler loud enough to drown out game audio; the FX series is widely considered NVIDIA's worst generation.
- Apple's original iMac G3 shipped with the ATI Rage 128 Pro, making it the most popular Mac GPU of its era.
Why it matters: The visualization reframes GPU history as a back-and-forth duel rather than a NVIDIA coronation. 3dfx, ATI, and AMD each held the crown at different points — from Voodoo's 1996 mass adoption through ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro dethroning NVIDIA in 2002. The ~$299 launch price has stayed remarkably stable across three decades even as transistor counts grew from 1 million (Voodoo) to 92 billion (peak).
