How did retro consoles handle graphics before modern GPUs?
Graphics chips could draw but not compute, until the Xbox arrived.
Graphics chips could draw but not compute, until the Xbox arrived.
The short version
- In the NES, it was the Ricoh 2C02 Picture Processing Unit that rendered game graphics.
- A pretty rudimentary chip, it couldn't run any code.
- Instead, it took tile artwork from the cartridge and a couple of lookup tables from memory and turned them into a TV signal, one scanline at a time.
What happened
That arrangement — a dedicated picture generator fed by the CPU — is how most consoles rendered their graphics from the late 1970s into the 2000s. When Microsoft's first Xbox came out in November 2001, it didn't look much like any console before it.
Why it matters
Instead, it was built around an Intel Pentium III and a graphics chip NVIDIA made specially for it, based on the GeForce 3.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Engadget via the links above and below.