transform, clipping, and lighting
Pipeline that converts 3D coordinates to screen pixels; offloading it to the GPU freed CPUs and established hardware parallelism useful in AI.
1 milestone
NVIDIA GeForce 256: Introduction of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
In 1999, NVIDIA released the GeForce 256, which the company marketed as the first graphics processing unit (GPU), a single-chip processor capable of performing transform, lighting, clipping, and rendering operations that had previously required the host CPU, enabling sustained high-throughput parallel computation.