Info History of nVIDIA Graphics cards Vol. 1

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History of nVIDIA Graphics cards Vol. 1
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nVIDIA was founded on April 5, 1993, by Jensen Huang,Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

1. NV1

May 22, 1995 nVIDIA Corporation and SGS-THOMSON announced the introduction of the NV1 and STG2000X Multimedia Accelerators.

The NV1 and STG2000X are the first complete Multimedia Accelerators to deliver the power of real-time photorealistic 3D graphics, video based special effects, full-motion video acceleration, and concurrent high-fidelity audio, in a single chip.

1.1 nVIDIA
1.1.1 NV1
1.1.1.1 Chip Evaluation board
Chip Evaluation board of NV1 graphics card.

（From EDGE magazine Februay 1996）

 

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5.2.2 VIPER V770 Ultra

TNT2 Ultra chip

 

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5.2.2 VIPER V730

Vanta chip

The PCB date of this graphics card is 9923 weeks, and Diamond was acquired by S3 on June 22, 1999 (9926 week).

It is a PCB board made before the acquisition. The memory chip date on the card is 9929 weeks, indicating that the card was finally manufactured by S3.

 

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5.3 Gigabyte

5.3.1 GA-660 ES

 

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5.3.2 GA-622 ES

(From anandtech.com)

 

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5.4 Creative

CT5823

 

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5.5 ELSA

Synergy II-16

 

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5.6 Canopus

SPECTRA Light T32PCI

 

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5.7 ASUS

AGP-V3800/16M(DTF)

 

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5.8 MSI

MS8807




(From Palcal on vgamuseum.info)


It can be seen from the previous graphics cards that all manufacturers have not completely copied the original nVIDIA design, at most they only partially borrowed from the original nVIDIA design. Even the public version launched by nVIDIA is not directly used by manufacturers. In addition to the fact that each manufacturer deliberately retains its own unique design concepts and styles, the design and use cycle of graphics cards is long, and everyone still has time to spend on design. But this time that can be consumed is gradually shortening. Big factories like STB and Dimeng were acquired in the TNT era. After entering the GPU era, graphics cards are updated faster, and manufacturers have to accept nVIDIA's public version design. Graphics cards that do not use the public version design are almost all shrunk designs and become synonymous with low-end graphics cards. So far, almost all the graphics cards look exactly the same, the only difference is the fan and heat sink. Therefore, the history of nVIDIA graphics cards introduced in the following chapters will be based on nVIDIA’s evaluation boards and reference versions.

.end.