11th October 1999
Nvidia releases GeForce 256

The GeForce 256 was the first product released under the GeForce brand and was described by Nvidia as a "Graphics Processing Unit", a term which later became more commonly used to describe any graphics card. Nvidia's definition at the time was "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second."

It had support of the full Direct3D 7 API and was supported by games up to about 2006.