If you’re a late comer to the GPU scene, then we heartily welcome you to what can only be described as ‘happy land’. It’s a place filled with amazing architectures, one or two obvious and top tier vendors and the one unifying set of APIs that is DirectX. Yes, OpenGL lives on, but it’s a dwindling flame against the raging inferno of Microsoft’s offering.
It’s not hard to make choices in an environment like this. You have ATI or NVIDIA, you usually have access to every 3D effect your video card can generate thanks to a wholesale movement towards general purpose and generic GPU hardware where the shiny stuff is dictated through software APIs, and you have games that are designed around them in a beautiful – almost symbiotic - relationship.
And don’t us gamers just love GPUs? While CPUs, memory, motherboards and a whole host of other hardware allow us to play games, enthusiast gamers have a certain well-earned reverence for the video card as the guts of the gaming outfit. You can tell with the sexy heat-sinks, artwork on fans and full page GPU advertisements featuring half-naked women wielding broadswords, that GPU manufacturers know it too.
Of course, because we’ve decided to present you with a list of some of the most influential 3D graphics cards to ever grace the desktop arena, it’s important to note that covering the last couple of years simply wouldn’t do it justice. GPU technology is ridiculously fast paced, driven by a craving for sexy 3D entertainment and at the mercy of edgy development cycles, so there’s a huge slab of history – and with it historic video cards – that tend to get left by the wayside.
So we’re going to present you with a list that encompasses not only newcomers and powerhouses of the present day, but the cards that started it all, the ones that existed back in the chaotic technology fray of the 90s. We won’t get through every single one because there’s just too many, and although we’d like to take time out at length to pay homage to the GLINT or Number Nine’s woefully expensive ‘Imagine 128’, we’ve had to cherry pick some of the highlights (and a couple of lowlights) from the evolution of 3D graphics that are worth celebrating and respecting geek style.
There’s a heavy focus here on older tech, only because the newer stuff – the current generation – are still influencing, still making history, and their fate isn’t completely written yet. So when we re-visit this subject in another few years armed with a fresh batch of nerd monkeys on typewriters, you can bet there will be some new chipsets on the list, having made their mark on the history of GPU development and advancement.
Read on for pixel pushing goodness!
