NVIDIA will soon be giving away a legendary retro video card autographed by the company's founder

Ahead of CES 2025, NVIDIA has announced a giveaway of several “museum” video cards, framed and signed by the company's founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Among the prizes NVIDIA has offered its X followers is a GeForce 256 video card, introduced in 1999.

In addition to the GeForce 256, NVIDIA plans to give away four more retro video cards with the founder's signature, but their exact list has not yet been disclosed. Most likely, these will be products of significant importance for the company's history from past years that accidentally remained in stock.

This marketing move is typical for major industry events, such as the CES exhibition, which traditionally becomes a platform for the presentation of gaming innovations from NVIDIA.

The History of GeForce 256

The GeForce 256, introduced by NVIDIA in 1999, was the first graphics card the company called a “graphics processing unit” (GPU), ushering in a new era in graphics processing. It also launched the GeForce brand, which has since become synonymous with high-performance graphics solutions for gamers and professionals.

Key Features of the GeForce 256:

• Hardware Transforming and Lighting (T&L): The GeForce 256 was one of the first graphics cards to support hardware transforms and lighting, reducing the load on the CPU and improving performance and graphics quality in games.

• NV10 architecture: The video card was based on the NV10 architecture, had 4 pixel pipelines and supported up to 64 MB of DDR memory, which provided high performance for its time.

• Support for DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL 1.2: This allowed the use of the latest graphics technologies and effects in games of the late 1990s years.

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256, NVIDIA celebrated the event by noting its impact on the development of graphics technology and the gaming industry.

GeForce 256 – watch the video: