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The GeForce from NVIDIA is a 3D graphics chipset or engine that enhances the effect of graphics applications and games. It’s primarily targeted at gamers and takes the entire gaming experience to another level. The name GeForce came out of a competition that NVIDIA held in 1999 to name the successor to the RIVA TNT2 line of graphics boards.

The GeForce 256 was the world’s first Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and was launched in August 1999. This was the first PC graphics chip with hardware transform, lighting and shading. There were no 3D games at that time which could utilise this feature. In 2000, NVIDIA came out with the GeForce 2, another high-performance graphics chip.

Since then, NVIDIA has regularly introduced new boards every year with progressive innovations. The successors to the GeForce 2 were the GeForce 3 in 2001 and the GeForce 4 in 2002. Later in 2004, NVIDIA came out with GeForce FX which had a different architecture. This chipset was supported by DirectX 7 and 8. However, initial models suffered from performance issues and excessive heating which required two-slot cooling solutions. Originally the GeForce FX was called the 5000 series as it was the fifth generation of GeForce, but NVIDIA marketed the cards as GeForce FX instead of GeForce 5 to highlight “the dawn of cinematic rendering”.

GeForce 6 and 7 were launched in subsequent years with continuous improvements in performance and capability. In 2006, NVIDIA introduced the GeForce 8 which was the first GPU to fully support DirectX 10. Built on a brand new architecture, it has fully unified shader architecture. GeForce 9, the latest in this series, was released in February 2008 and is a cheaper variant of the 8 series with some similar and some newer capabilities.

The GeForce 9600 GT is on a 65 nanometer process and sports a 256-bit memory bus like the 8 series. The differences between the G9X and the G8X are miniscule. The G9X has better compression technology and the G92 and the G94 both support new PureVideo features that enable a far better experience when video players roll out software support for these additions.

NVIDIA GeForce continues to be the preferred graphics engine for gamers though it receives close competition from other players like AMD Radeon. However, from the Twin Texel processing power of the NVIDIA TNT2 to the world’s first GPU, NVIDIA has consistently introduced innovative products, and provided graphics acceleration for home, business and professional computing.