GPU Innovations and your opinions

[_Rapid]

Name the GPU you think was the most innovative at time of release.

 

Go!

[Mira Yurizaki]

9 minutes ago, _Rapid said:

Name the GPU you think was the most innovative at time of release.

 

Go!

GeForce 256. Because it's the world's first "GPU"

 

But seriously, moving the geometry and lighting functions from the CPU to the GPU revolutionized the way real-time 3D applications would look. Granted it wasn't the first GPU to do this, but it brought it to relevance.

 

Although I want to add another contender. The Nintendo 64's Reality Co-Processor in hindsight was also a revolutionary graphics processor. One could argue it was the first fully-programmable GPU for the consumer market. A lot of the things we see today, it was probably done on the N64 at some point. It's just too bad Nintendo didn't tell anyone how to write custom microcode until damn near its end of life.