For 3D tasks, the Voodoo graphics accelerator greatly outperformed its competition and established 3DfxвЂ™s dominance in the 3D accelerator market. Overall, it was a decent 2D card but a poor 3D performer.ДЄ 3D-only graphics accelerator, the Voodoo 1 required you to have a separate video card for 2D graphics. Like the NVIDIA NV1, it had some issues with DirectX compatibility. The NV1 utilized a 3D rendering process that was not supported by DirectX 1.0 and as a result, many games could not run on the card.ДЄTIвЂ™s very first 3D accelerator, the Rage 1 was capable of handling both 2D tasks as well. NVIDIAвЂ™s first product was a combination 2D and 3D graphics accelerator that was unfortunately doomed by the release of DirectX 1.0 a few short months later. It also contained a parallel printer port so that users did not have to add another card for printer connectivity.

Those in turn were contained in a 9 Г— 14 pixel box, so the display had a вЂњresolutionвЂќ of 720 Г— 350 pixels. Said to be the first video card ever, it displayed 80 columns Г— 25 lines of text and symbols. Resolutions were also quite small, with SVGA (800 Г— 600) introduced late in the decade. The first consumer video cards appeared in the mid-вЂ80s and primarily tackled 2D workloads rather than 3D.

1980s вЂ“ The Early Days of Consumer Video Cards From pre-VGA to 4K, we cover the most important video cards of the past thirty five years. Since that time, improvements to manufacturing processes have shrunk die sizes from 200+ nanometers (nm) in the вЂ90s down to just 28 nm today. Video cards have come a long way in a relatively short period, with the first units in the early вЂ80s only capable of displaying eight colors.

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