Nvidia is a world leader in computer graphics and visual computing technology. The company has spent the last 20 years introducing groundbreaking innovations to the world of games, professional visualization, data centers and mobile devices. It is best known for its graphics processors that power desktops, notebooks, workstations, game consoles and TVs. Nvidia’s GPU technology is also used in special effects in films such as James Cameron’s Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean: Gore Verbinski’s Dead Man’s Chest
Nvidia was founded on April 17, 1993 by two Stanford University alumni who received $ 40,000 from family and friends after they successfully sold their startup “Chips & Technologies” to other semiconductor companies such as VLSI Technology and Intel Corporation. At that time, the company had 30 employees and its mission was to create graphics processor technology that would be as revolutionary as hard disk storage.
In 1996, Nvidia created a 3D processor that brought games to life with texture mapping and full support for the OpenGL API. Three years later, in 1999, Nvidia began working on the geForce 256, which was the world’s first GPU to feature hardware accelerated Transform and Lighting (T&L), a method for quickly rendering complex 3D graphics. In 2001, Nvidia introduced the GeForce2 GTS graphics processor with 32-bit color support, followed by the GeForce4 4 Go mobile chip in 2002. In 2004, Nvidia developed the first DirectX 9.0 graphics processor with full Shader Model 2.0 support and the world’s first PureVideo HD consumer video playback technology.
In 2006, Nvidia launched the first unified shader architecture and the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU with a revolutionary unified architecture that allowed for vertex, pixel and vertex attribute streaming, allowing the creation of multiple graphics cards with any desired performance configuration. This allowed for the creation of graphics processors that were more efficient than the previous generation, which was used in computers with older graphics hardware with only 2 pixel shaders.
Since then, Nvidia has established itself as a leader in the graphics card market and continues to supply computer graphics chips to this day.