[pjmlp]

TI chips for arcades are considered one of the first.

"The TMS34010, developed by Texas Instruments and released in 1986, was the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit. While specialized graphics hardware existed earlier, such as blitters, the TMS34010 chip is a microprocessor which includes graphics-oriented instructions, making it a combination of a CPU and what would later be called a GPU."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

And they weren't alone in the history of graphics hardware.

[dagmx]

Yep, and I think perhaps that’s where folks are getting hung up.

NVIDIA didn’t invent the GPU. They coined the modern term “graphics processing unit”. Prior to that, various hardware existed but went by other expanded names or don’t fully match NVIDIAs arbitrary definition, which is what we use today.

[rzzzt]

IBM's PGA card had an additional 8088 dedicated to graphics primitives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Graphics_Controll...