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Comment by jwilk | Hacker News Reader

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

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From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.

If I recall correctly, "GPU" was attached to the GeForce 3, which introduced programmable pixel and vertex shaders (planting the seeds for later, general-purpose processing developments like CUDA and eventually cryptocurrency mining).

Frankly, I don't remember with certainty. But Wikipedia seems to agree with what my memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

" The term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU", or Graphics Processing Unit,[2] although the term had been in use since at least the 1980s.[3] It was presented as a "single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines".[4] Rival ATI Technologies coined the term "visual processing unit" or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.[5] "

I had forgotten that ATI initially tried to push the term VPU instead of accepting NVIDIA's terminology. The goal of both companies's marketing teams was the same--to convince the market that GPUs were as indispensable as CPUs and not just optional accelerators.

No, blue11 is right. They made a big deal of the "GPU" in the original GeForce 256.

Yes.

I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.

I remember seeing computers marketed as having both a "2D accelerator" and a "3D accelerator" -- separate cards. I never had the cash for a Voodoo card back in the day, but I certainly wanted one!

The classic combo of Matrox for 2D and 3Dfx for 3D. Surprisingly Matrox still exists.

Yep, but their cards aren't really consumer. They only do expensive specialized card for multi-monitor output (think serving up 8+ screens at a train station).

Wasn't that only the Voodoo1/Voodoo2, with the pass through cable? I don't think any other manufacture did that.

That's nothing, I remember the need for 4, a 2D card, two Voodoo 2s in SLI and a dedicated hardware DVD decoder card :-)

The picture quality was terrible with multiple pass through analog VGA cables...

I used a TV card and hooked my DVD player into it via the antenna cable.

I think my first graphics card was a Riva 128. If I'm remembering correctly, the box billed it as a "2D/3D Multimedia Accelerator".

It kinda feels weird that we use the term "GPU" to describe modern cards. Seems to me that there is much more demand for these components in the AI and cryptocoin mining markets than anything utilizing graphics.

I wonder if we're about to witness the second death of PC gaming?

>Seems to me that there is much more demand for these components in the AI and cryptocoin mining markets than anything utilizing graphics.

Only outside home use.

Hardly matters if the components are too expensive for home users to feel comfortable buying them.

Gaming is bigger than the movie industry at this point. I don't think even a sub-category like PC gaming is going anywhere soon.

While unlikely to disappear completely, it can certainly decline to a much smaller niche. If you recall the state of PC gaming before Steam took off, it was in a decline.

Why? Think about the root of the word "graphics" and why GPUs are well suited to processing ...graphs.

Why would high demand for GPUs signal the death of PC gaming? I would expect the opposite.

I'm not sure what you mean, but the root of graphics is graphikos, Greek for writing or drawing. Mathematical graphs are called that by analogy to their graphical forebears.

You have confused root and origin. The root of graphics is graph.

The comment I replied to said GPUs are more useful in cryptocoin mining and AI rather than graphics. Cryptocoin mining and AI are graph workloads. This is why GPUs are well suited to these tasks.

The root word of graphics is graphic.

The root word of graph is graphic; "graph" is a shortening of the phrase "graphic formula", apparently.

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