Reviewing the last 25 years since GameStar was founded is not easy. Especially considering the technology that has not only accompanied us in video games since then, but has also become a part of our lives.
Nevertheless, we have made it our mission to look for the biggest tech leaps of the past 25 years. In particular, we found the groundbreaking technologies that amazed us and gave us a glimpse into the future. Look forward to a pinch of nostalgia and a mix of technology that we still admire today.
The first dual core CPU
Until 2005, CPUs were still equipped with a single-core processor, which is almost unimaginable today. This year, Intel, ahead of AMD, ventured the step of their first dual-core processor for a whopping 999 US dollars – the Pentium 840 XE.
Dual-core processors became famous primarily through the Core 2 Duo series and popular and widespread models such as Intel’s Core 2 Duo E6600.
The first dual-core processor from Intel showed what the future will bring.
Before the introduction of multi-core processors, the manufacturers optimized not only the command sets such as MMX (Multi Media Extension) but above all the clock frequency in order to tease more out of the single processor core. In general, a high CPU clock rate was a major indicator of performance at the time.
The Geforce 8800 GTX set a milestone
The powerhouse from Nvidia with the name GeForce 8800 GTX
came onto the market in 2006 and outclassed all graphics cards. The new reference of the top graphics cards not only showed itself to be far superior in the benchmarks. In addition to sheer power, it was also considered extremely quiet.
The Geforce 8800 was a real board and set accents with its performance.
In particular, support for DirectX 10 and a unified shader architecture, which should enable better utilization of the GPU, were new. There were also 768 megabytes (GDDR3) graphics memory and 128 shader units with 681 million transistors. The predecessor, the GeForce 7900 GTX, only had 278 million transistors.
This graphics card should be fondly remembered by most PC gamers. Despite the comparatively expensive price of just under 600 dollars, it was a worthwhile purchase in the gaming sector. You can find out more about this in our test, which we published on the occasion of our anniversary:
25 years GameStar
Perhaps the most legendary graphics card of all time
Ray tracing is finding its way into video games
Anyone who is remotely familiar with video games will have heard of ray tracing by now. With the introduction of the RTX 2000 graphics cards in 2018, Nvidia wanted to advance the core of the technology that had been known for a long time. But what exactly does ray tracing actually mean?
Basically, this term means a technique for improving lighting conditions. As the name suggests, this is done by tracking (light) rays to better display reflections, shadows and lighting conditions. Actually, ray tracing is not new and was previously mainly used in the film industry.
In some cases, you don’t even notice ray tracing. Or did you see right away that Spiderman is reflected?
With the RTX 2000 series, Nvidia has added special processing units to accelerate ray tracing. Depending on the game and setting, hardware can still be overwhelmed, but since then ray tracing has played an increasingly important role in games.
You can find out more details about how ray tracing works in the article What is ray tracing? – Ray tracing versus rasterization.
The first mass-market VR glasses
You think there were no VR glasses before 2010? Unfortunately we have to disappoint you – this story is fictitious. In fact, the history and development goes back much further than we can summarize in a compact article.
In the gaming sector, at least in 1995, Nintendo tried its hand at virtual worlds with the Virtual Boy. The headset was never launched in this country, but it was in the USA and Japan. Unlike conventional VR glasses today, the glasses from Nintendo are not simply placed on the head.
It was placed on a table with the help of a stand and the player looked into the glasses. As anyone can imagine, the product was far from a real experience in VR. This was partly due to the technical properties of these glasses, which only used a monochrome image (red LEDs on a black background).
The first Oculus Rift glasses were launched in 2016.
In 2013, Palmer Luckey raised hopes in this area with his design of the Oculus Rift and a Kickstarter campaign. The $250,000 goal was reached in a matter of hours and supported by various developers in the industry. In September 2014 we were able to gain our own experience with the Dev Kit 2, you can find out more about this in the article Tried Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 – Virtual Reality 1.5
.
Eventually, Meta (then known as Facebook) bought Oculus in 2014, causing unrest in the community. In 2016, however, the first Occulus Rift was finally launched and opened its doors to anyone interested in new technologies. In Europey, the mass-market VR glasses were delivered from March 28 for 741 dollars (incl. shipping).
Which technological leaps do we still have ready for you? Go to the next page!
Table of Contents
