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before CES In 2025, Nvidia will introduce five classic GPUs signed by CEO Jensen Huang. The trillion-dollar GPU giant has posted its first GPU giveaway On Xfeaturing GeForce 256 And GeForce 8800 Ultra.
The giveaway is under the “GeforceGreats” hashtag that Nvidia has set up for all of its CES 2025-related content. Both GPUs are mounted in a black display box displaying Jensen’s signature in gold handwriting at the bottom right. To win, comment on every X post.
Nvidia strategically selects these two specific GPUs for the first and second Classic GPUs (out of five) to give away as a gift. the GeForce 256 It was Nvidia’s first GeForce GPU and the first video card ever to be sold with a GPU moniker (video cards were previously called “3D cards”). the GeForce 8800 The Ultra was the first CUDA GPU to be introduced worldwide. This technology would become one of the most valuable and popular Nvidia technologies the company has ever created, shaping the way GPUs are used even today.
5 days until CES.5 for Classic Cards up for grabs. All signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang 👀First: GeForce 256, the world’s first GPUWant it? Comment #GeForceGreats for a chance to win… pic.twitter.com/Hu0z0nAIlvJanuary 1, 2025
The Geforce 256 was released in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom and the beginning of modern 3D graphics rendering functionality in computers. The GPU is equipped with four massive pixel shaders (yes, just four), four TMUs, and four ROPs. It had 32MB of memory and ran on a 64-bit memory bus with a memory bandwidth of 1,144GB/s. The GPU has one VGA output and supports DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL 1.2.
The GeForce 256 represents a shift in mindset in how video cards are looked at. Previously, all video cards were called “3D” cards because they were designed specifically for 3D display and were often less complex than central processing units (CPUs). However, the GeForce 256 was a different beast because it had 23 million transistors in the same range as the best CPUs during the time, such as AMD’s Athlon chipsets and Intel’s Pentium III CPUs. Several years later, this would be the precursor to CUDA when GPUs began to compete directly with CPUs, performing the same calculations as CPUs.
The massive transistor count of the GeForce 256 at that time would be supplemented by support for new graphics technology. One such technology was support for the then-new conversion and lighting engine. This technology enabled the GeForce 256 to convert a 3D scene with all its objects from “world space” to “screen space”, essentially converting assets from the 3D engine into a viewable image on the screen.
4 days until CES. Win a GeForce 8800 Ultra – the first CUDA GPU signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang 🖋️ Comment #GeForceGreats for a chance to win! pic.twitter.com/xKNXmq5NmQJanuary 2, 2025
Before the arrival of the 256, this workload was very demanding on the CPU. 3D video cards often wait for the CPU to finish this task. With this functionality built into the GeForce 256, the GPU can do the job by improving performance and enabling developers to push the 3D rendering envelope further than ever before.
Launched in 2007, the GeForce 8800 Ultra features 128 shader cores, 32 TMUs, 24 ROPs, 16 SMs, 96 KB of L2 cache, a 612 MHz base clock, a 1512 MHz shader clock, and a 384-bit memory bus. With 768MB GDDR3 memory and 104GB/s memory bandwidth. It was the groundbreaking GPU running on the Tesla G80 GPU die, the first infrastructure and the first GPU to support CUDA, and it also supports DirectX 11.1 and the Shader Model 4.0 standard.
Coda It is one of the most important technologies Nvidia has ever produced. This key technology has changed how GPUs are used forever by enabling them to run general-purpose computations, which could otherwise be run by the same CPUs. The first generation CUDA supported C code and required a dedicated CUDA driver to function.
CUDA has become the dominant way to perform general-purpose computing tasks that greatly benefit from parallelism in enterprise applications. CUDA ushered in the era of general-purpose GPUs, where GPUs were no longer used just for graphics acceleration but as general-purpose general processing units.
