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The History of Nvidia

The life path of Nvidia can rightfully be called a real success story. This story began like classic films about enthusiasts. In 1993, three experienced microelectronics engineers launched a new company, which from the very beginning was aimed at a specific niche: 3D computer graphics. This meant that the young and obscure Nvidia had to enter the arena against the established 3dfx, which then dominated the graphics card market.

Fun fact: Jensen Huang, one of the founding trio, previously worked for AMD, which in less than 10 years will be Nvidia's archrival. The other two founders, Curtis Prem and Chris Malachowski, were employees of Sun Microsystems, one of the world's leading server software and hardware companies. In a word, the preparation of the founders was impressive, which was proved by the subsequent battle with the titans of the graphics card industry.


The first Nvidia video card with the uncomplicated name NV1 was released in 1995, it included chips for sound and joysticks. In terms of the speed of three-dimensional graphics, it turned out to be the leader, but there were problems with rendering two-dimensional interfaces. And then there's Microsoft planted a mine under NV1 - it released the DirectX API, the hardware support for which the Nvidia video card did not have. The company tried to work on NV2, but it soon became obvious that a new graphics card had to be built from scratch.

1997 The Riva family of graphics cards is the epitome of Nvidia's attempt to define itself wherever possible. Riva supported both DirectX and OpenGL in hardware, but 3dfx's proprietary Glide API was still unavailable. This means that the best games of the time could not run at maximum settings on Nvidia graphics cards. But the company went the other way - released Detonator drivers with support for 3DNow! In combination with AMD processors, this provided the highest rendering speed for 3D games.

In 1999, Nvidia for the first time divided its video cards into 2 lines: mass - represented by Riva TNT2, and professional  - represented by Quadro. Moreover, the separation was purely marketing, in ordinary video cards they simply blocked part of the functionality , mainly related to anti-aliasing and lighting. This enabled the company to occupy all market segments without expanding production capacity.

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In the same year, Nvidia released the GeForce 256, the world's first GPU, a full-fledged graphics chip that frees the CPU from the calculation of transformation and scene lighting. 3dfx was no longer able to make a decent answer, its days were numbered. In 2000, Nvidia took over its recent rival, and all efforts shifted towards competing with ATI. The beginning of the new millennium was rosy for Nvidia: the number of video chips sold reached 100 million, the company's rapid growth, hardware support for DirectX 9, the implementation of SLI technology, and cooperation with leading game developers.

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But this period was not without dark moments. Having pompously presented video cards of the FX series with hardware support for DirectX 9, Nvidia was horrified to realize that the pixel shader unit version 2 was a complete failure. The sworn rival in the face of ATI R300 chips was head and shoulders above Nvidia cards in terms of performance. The situation was rectified in 2004 with the release of the GeForce 6000 series, which had shaders version 3.0 and support for the SLI mode. And with the release in 2006 of the GeForce 8000 with hardware implementation of DirectX 10 and version 4 shaders, the era of unconditional dominance of Nvidia in the gaming market began.

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2007 was marked by the arrival of Nvidia in the field of parallel computing - the company presents the CUDA architecture and Tesla video cards. From now on, Nvidia is becoming a desirable brand for supercomputer manufacturers , using Tesla allows you to set records for computing power with moderate power consumption and.

Of course, Nvidia did not forget about its traditional market either: the GeForce 400, 500, 600, 700 series each time outperformed its competitor in terms of performance , while not requiring a particularly powerful power supply. A series of acquisitions of small companies gave the company access to exclusive developments such as the PhysX engine, the merits of which gamers quickly appreciated, and 3D Vision technology brought virtual reality to the masses.

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At the present time, Nvidia remains the green giant of the computer graphics industry, and is not even going to give up its positions, regularly delighting consumers with more and more powerful video cards. The company's presence in both the gaming and heavy computing industries is extremely broad, and it would take something truly mind-blowing to knock Nvidia off the map.

 

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