Graham Singer over at Techspot posted a series of articles a few weeks ago covering the history of the modern GPU. It is well-written and in-depth. For GPU affectionados, this is a nice read. There are 4 parts to the series: Part 1: (1976 – 1995) The Early Days of 3D Consumer Graphics Part 2: (1995 – 1999) 3Dfx Voodoo: The Game-changer Part 3: (2000 – 2006) The Nvidia vs. ATI Era Begins Part 4: (2006 – 2013) The Modern GPU: Stream processing units a.k.a. GPGPU Enjoy!