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Nvidia has a long history in the PC gaming space and it’s leveraging every inch of that for its briefing at CES this year, one of the world’s biggest technology conferences. All of this is presumably to get as many eyes as possible onto the unveiling of its next generation of graphics cards.
Tweeted out on January 1, five days before its CES briefing on January 6, Nvidia announced there would be “5 classic cards up for grabs”, starting with the GeForce 256, which Nvidia considers to be the first GPU in the world.
First released on October 11, 1999, it was manufactured by TSMC, who still work with Nvidia to this day, on a 220 nm CMOS process.
For context on that figure, the Ada Lovelace architecture found on the RTX 40 series line uses a TSMC custom 5 nm design. Housed in a lovely black frame, sporting the “world’s 1st GPU” claim and Jen-Hsun Huang’s (Nvidia CEO) signature, you can get a chance to win the 256 by simply commenting “#GeForceGreats” on the original tweet.
Following this up is the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which can also be won by commenting the same hashtag on the announcement tweet. This is once again signed and has “the 1st CUDA GPU” written in the frame.
The 8800 Ultra was Nvidia’s first unified shader GPU, which cemented Nvidia as a good choice for those looking to edit large amounts of data or work with graphics and designs.
We are expecting more of these classic cards to be announced over the coming days but the focus on “world’s 1st” is very telling here, and suggests that could be a theme of the show itself on January 6. If not this, that could just be Nvidia bragging about its history in the PC gaming world.
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Both giveaways so far focus on the same hashtag, which seems to be intended to build hype for the show itself. From December 13th, Nvidia has been celebrating 25 years of gaming with 25 days of giveaways. These last five classic cards are just the icing on the cake of all those giveaways.
Interestingly, the Nvidia Twitch account has been constantly streaming, announcing mystery boxes every few hours, urging people to go follow social media accounts, and this is all topped off with a “total hype to date” bar, which sits at 235651, at time of writing.
This is all to say that the CES briefing seems intended to be a rather big one, given the months of PR building up social media accounts and linking to resources on the show. We are currently expecting announcements or teases of the RTX 50 series line, like the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090.
The keynote from Nvidia will start at 6:30 PM PST on January 6 and you can watch it via YouTube, LinkedIn, X and more on the day. However, if you don’t fancy watching the full show, the PC Gamer hardware team will be going over all the best announcements on the day and the following week.
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Kurt Indovina
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