Which Nvidia graphics card from 1999 was marketed as the first GPU?

Which Nvidia graphics card from 1999 was marketed as the first GPU? The GeForce 256. Nvidia announced it on August 31, 1999, and released it in October as the first product in its GeForce line.

The distinction came from hardware integration. Earlier 3D accelerators commonly relied on the computer’s CPU for geometry calculations. The GeForce 256 placed transform and lighting, along with triangle setup, clipping and rendering functions, on the graphics chip itself. Nvidia therefore marketed it as “the world’s first GPU,” defining a GPU as a single-chip processor capable of handling these tasks and processing at least 10 million polygons per second.

The GeForce 256 used Nvidia’s NV10 chip and was a major step for consumer 3D graphics. It was also the first fully Direct3D 7-compliant 3D accelerator. The “256” did not mean 256 megabytes of memory; it referred to Nvidia’s 256-bit QuadPipe rendering-engine branding.

Two main memory versions appeared. The original SDR model arrived in October 1999, followed by a faster DDR version in December. The card succeeded the RIVA TNT2 and was followed by the GeForce 2 series. Quadro products shared related technology but targeted professional workstation graphics.