Two GTX 580s in SLI are responsible for the AI we have today — Nvidia's Huang revealed that the invention of deep learning began with two flagship Fermi GPUs in 2012
In the following years, pixel and vertex shader hardware became the primary area of GPU development and progress. The GeForce 6 series, launched in April 2004, ushered in DirectX 9.0c and Shader model 3.0, which brought us "smart shaders", or true dynamic flow control in GPU programs. This meant that developers could start writing "uber-shaders" which could handle disparate material types in a single program without tanking the frame rate. It also brought along Vertex Texture Fetch for displacement mapping, hardware geometry instancing for lush fields of grass and dense forests, and HDR rendering, allowing for radically more realistic lighting.
But it was really the GeForce 8 series where things took a drastic turn. Launched to much fanfare in late 2006, the GeForce 8 series was the launch of the Tesla microarchitecture. Tesla was NVIDIA's first design with fully unified shaders. That meant that there was no longer a split between pixel and vertex shaders; the GPU was now a fully programmable processor with far fewer of the limitations that existed before. It's no coincidence that the GeForce 8 series launched alongside the first version of CUDA, NVIDIA's proprietary compute framework.
The weird part of technological evolution is that it rarely looks important in the moment. In fact, sometimes it even looks like a regression. The groundwork laid by the GeForce 3 was of critical importance. It was a bet that graphics hardware should be programmable, and it put NVIDIA ahead of the pack in that regard. Twenty-five years later, that bet is running the world's most powerful AI datacenters, and it all happened because gamers wanted better lighting in video games. The GeForce 3 wasn't the fastest card in the games of its day, but it was the first card for tomorrow's, and "tomorrow" turned out to be very, very large .
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Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-17/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Zak Killian Contributor Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.
Dementoss That long ago, I was using a Voodoo 3 3000, it did a fine job. Reply
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