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The IBM PGC (1984) was a discrete GPU with 320kB of RAM and slightly over 64kB of ROM.

The EGA (1984) and VGA (1987) could conceivably be considered a GPU although not turning complete. EGA had 64, 128, 192, or 256K and VGA 256K.

The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete although it had 512kB. The Image Adapter/A (1989) was far more powerful, pretty much the first modern GPU as we know them and came with 1MB expandable to 3MB.



Neither EGA or VGA were "GPUs", they were dumb framebuffers. Later VGA chipsets had rudimentary acceleration, basically just blitters - but that was a help.

The PGC was kind of a GPU if you squint a bit. It didn't work the way a modern GPU does where you've got masses of individual compute cores working on the same problem, but it did have a processor roughly as fast as the host processor that you could offload simple drawing tasks to. It couldn't do 3D stuff like what we'd call a GPU today does, but it could do things like solid fills and lines.

In today's money the PGC cost about the same as an RTX PRO 6000, so no-one really had them.


A video card is not a GPU.


> The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete

WTF? Tell me more!

I have one, but I have no matching screen so I never tried it... Maybe it's worth finding a converter.




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