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I suspect it’s your use of ‘GPU’ that’s causing the confusion. I would expect a GPU to have some form of 3D acceleration or compute capability and I don’t think
by mnd999 5y ago
I suspect it’s your use of ‘GPU’ that’s causing the confusion. I would expect a GPU to have some form of 3D acceleration or compute capability and I don’t think that’s really applicable to the EGA / VGA video chips of the 386 era.
I could be incorrect though, I’m not sure there is a settled definition of GPU.
- giuliomagnifico 5y agoYes my mistake because also now we call “GPU” some cores related to graphic processing inside a complete SoC, but is not really a GPU, only a “graphic core/s”. What I wanted to say is that in order to “output something directly to a display like a contemporary SoC, this 386 system lacks only a graphic unit”. Maybe in this way is more correct.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoThe chip that would read RAM and generate a video signal was called a CRTC or RAMDAC back in the day - though RAMDAC, standing for RAM Digital to Analog Converter, only really applies to VGA which is analog. Some game consoles had an equivalent chip (Brooktree/Conexant) that was called an encoder. This is separate from anything that blits textures, rasterizes triangles to video RAM, performs parallelized math operations on big vector lists, runs shader code, or does MPEG/etc. decoding. All of that stuff is what constitutes a GPU. I'm not sure what the modern term for DAC is given everything is all digital.
- monocasa 5y agoI still see the CRTC or RAMDAC terms used for modern scan out engines, even if the terms are a bit anachronistic.
- h2odragon 5y agoThe 3dfx Voodoo1 card _might_ be classifiable as the first GPU, I'd say. While SGI had display hardware with more processing before that, it wasn't (afaik) in a form that could be moved to a different system.