Nvidia developed the GeForce graphics-processing brand, founded in 1999.
Nvidia introduced the GeForce 256 in 1999 and described it as the world’s first graphics processing unit, or GPU. The brand became closely associated with graphics cards for personal computers and gaming systems. Nvidia later expanded its GPU technology into professional visualization, data centers, autonomous-vehicle research and artificial intelligence.
GPUs are designed to perform many calculations in parallel, making them useful for rendering images as well as training and running machine-learning models. This broader role helped Nvidia become one of the world’s most valuable semiconductor companies.
GeForce is a product family, not the name of the corporation. Nvidia Corporation was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. AMD’s Radeon and Intel’s Arc are competing graphics brands, which are sometimes mistakenly identified as GeForce products.