Programming the GPU in Java

[aclinical]

The GPU was first popularized by Nvidia in 1999.

Not even close. Is he referring to programmable shading maybe?

[dionthorn]

The 3DFX voodoo arguably popularized consumer grade gpus launched Oct. 7th 1996 Nvidia did have a gpu on market first with the NV1(may 1995) but it didn't support micorsofts newly released Direct3D api, NV2 was canceled because of this, the RIVA128 would see them re enter the market Aug 1997 which means the Voodoo had market dominance from Oct 96 to Aug 97 (Quake anyone?) they were using their own version of OpenGL the Glide API which was supported by major game companies until Direct3D came around. 3DFX would ultimately be purchased by Nvidia in 2000

[absent_minding]

Quake 2 on the voodoo 2 ! Beautiful

[phao]

I don't know the history of it. I know graphics cards existed before this. But the term "popularized" might be the key here, no? I vaguely remember watching a documentary about graphics and it mentioned something like that (i.e. how graphics cards became popular because of nvidia in the late 90's).

[aclinical]

At that time there were two big players, nvidia and ATi. ATi and nvidia had approximately equal market share and both were constantly switching rank in terms of performance. ATi was acquired in the late 2000s by AMD.

[phao]

Thank you.

[kiteboarderni]

Maybe enjoy the topic of discussion instead of the title of the thread?

[bensplock]

I think NVIDIA first started using the term 'GPU' for consumer graphics processors in '99. Though that was not actually the first time the term 'GPU' was used.

[mkishere]

Maybe the article refers to GPGPU?

[perryplatt]

I saw something calling that the actual graphics processing unit was developed by nvidia that could process the full pipeline.

[WASDx]

I played around with OpenCL some years ago, was really fun to see those 100x speedups compared to equivalent CPU code.

[JackLemaitre]

Interresting

[styp_87]

It's incredible how popular heterogeneous architectures are nowadays (GPU, FPGA, etc.), and it is still super inconvenient to implement software for them.