From 3D Gaming to AI Dominance: How NVIDIA Seized the Future of Computing
TinfoilTricorn · x · 2026-08-03
A historical look at how NVIDIA laid the groundwork for its current AI dominance by focusing on parallel computing. In the mid-1990s, 3D rendering for PC games relied entirely on the CPU, resulting in poor performance. While most chip companies remained comfortable with 2D accelerators, a group of former Silicon Graphics engineers recognized the bottleneck, founded 3dfx, and released the dedicated 3D Voodoo Graphics card in 1996.
This pivotal shift towards specialized hardware for graphics not only transformed gaming but also set the stage for GPUs to become the foundational compute power for modern deep learning and AI.
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