Nick Driscoll

Nick is a professional GPU tools developer with a passion for understanding what makes games tick. He has over five years of 3D graphics programming experience and is always excited to share his knowledge with others. He works a lot with the Vulkan SDK and loves indie game development.

https://nickdriscoll.github.io/

GDEX 2025 Session: The History of the GPU | A modern graphics card is unbelievably complex, including dedicated hardware for rasterization, raytracing, neural network evaluation, and a system of programmability tying it all together. It's enough to make your head spin and wonder how this complexity emerged in the first place. This talk will explore the history of the GPU, from its humble beginnings as a simple fixed-function triangle rasterizer, to its present as a generic parallel computation behemoth.