Ahead KES In 2025, Nvidia will give away five classic GPUs signed by CEO Jensen Huang. Trillion-dollar GPU giant unveils first two GPU giveaways by Xwith the participation video card 256 and GeForce 8800 Ultra.
The giveaway is running under the “GeforceGreats” hashtag that Nvidia has set for all of its CES 2025-related content. Both GPUs are housed in a black box with Jensen’s signature in gold handwriting in the bottom right corner. Comment X on every post to win.
Nvidia strategically selects these two GPUs as the first and second (of five) classic GPUs to give away. video card 256 was Nvidia’s first GeForce graphics processor and the first video card sold under the GPU name (previously video cards were called “3D cards”). video card 8800 Ultra was the first CUDA GPU to be introduced worldwide. This technology would become one of the most valuable and popular Nvidia technologies ever created by the company, defining the way GPUs are used even today.
5 days on classic cards CES.5. EVERYTHING signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang 👀First: GeForce 256, the world’s first GPU Do you want it? Comment #GeForceGreats for a chance to win… pic.twitter.com/Hu0z0nAIlvJanuary 1, 2025
The Geforce 256 was released in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom and the dawn of modern 3D graphics rendering capabilities on computers. The GPU was equipped with a whopping four (yes, just four) pixel shaders, four TMUs and four ROPs. It had 32 MB of memory and ran on a 64-bit memory bus with a bandwidth of 1.144 GB/s. The GPU had one VGA output and supported DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL 1.2.
The GeForce 256 marked a shift in the perception of video cards. In the past, all graphics cards were called “3D” because they were designed specifically for 3D rendering and were often less complex than processors. However, the GeForce 256 was a completely different beast, as it had 23 million transistors in the same range as the best processors of the time, such as AMD’s Athlon chips and Intel’s Pentium III processors. This would become the precursor to CUDA a few years later, when GPUs would begin to compete directly with CPUs by performing the same calculations as CPUs.
The huge number of transistors in the GeForce 256 at that time will be supplemented with support for new graphics technologies. One of these technologies at that time was support for the new Transform and Lighting Engine. This technology allowed the GeForce 256 to transform a 3D scene and all its objects from “world space” to “screen space”, essentially converting assets from the 3D engine into a viewable image on the screen.
4 days until CES. Win the GeForce 8800 Ultra – CUDA’s first GPU. Signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. 🖋️Comment #GeForce Great for a chance to WIN! pic.twitter.com/xKNXmq5NmQJanuary 2, 2025
Before the 256 came along, this workload was very CPU intensive. “3D” graphics cards often wait for the processor to complete this task. With this functionality built into the GeForce 256, the GPU can handle this task, increasing performance and allowing developers to expand their 3D rendering capabilities than ever before.
The GeForce 8800 Ultra, released in 2007, has 128 shader cores, 32 TMUs, 24 ROPs, 16 SMs, 96 KB L2 cache, a 612 MHz core clock, a 1512 MHz shader clock, and a 384-bit memory bus. with 768 MB GDDR3 memory and 104 GB/s memory bandwidth. It was a flagship GPU running on Tesla’s G80 GPU die, the first core and first GPU architecture to support CUDA, as well as DirectX 11.1 and the Shader Model 4.0 standard.
WHERE is one of the most important technologies Nvidia has ever created. This key technology forever changed the way GPUs are used, allowing them to perform general-purpose calculations that the same processors can do. The first generation CUDA supported C code and required a special CUDA driver to work.
CUDA has become the predominant method for performing general-purpose computing tasks that benefit greatly from parallelization in enterprise applications. CUDA ushered in the era of general-purpose GPUs, where GPUs were no longer used solely for graphics acceleration, but became general multi-purpose processors.