Welcome to “Computer History Wednesdays.” Today we look at the hardware that makes modern hacking possible. You might think GPUs are for gaming, but for a Red Teamer, the GPU is a weapon of math destruction.

The history of Computer Graphics is a story of the transition from CPU (Central Processing Unit) to GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). It is the story of how we moved from drawing lines one by one to simulating light physics in real-time, and eventually, to parallel computing that powers AI and password cracking.

The Early Days: Vector Displays (1960s-70s)

Before pixels, we had vectors. Early monitors were like oscilloscopes; the electron beam drew lines directly from point A to point B.

  • Sketchpad (1963): Ivan Sutherland’s “Robot Draftsman” at MIT. It was the ancestor of CAD and the GUI.
  • Asteroids (1979): The classic arcade game used a vector display. The ships were incredibly bright and sharp because there were no jagged pixels—just pure glowing lines.

The Silicon Graphics Era (1980s-90s)

If you made a movie in the 90s, you used SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.). SGI machines were the supercomputers of the day. They used the MIPS architecture and running IRIX (Unix).

  • The SGI Indigo & Onyx: These purple behemoths rendered the T-1000 in Terminator 2 and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
  • Cultural Icon: In the movie Jurassic Park, when Lex sits at the computer and says “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”, she is navigating the actual 3D file system viewer (fsn) on an SGI workstation.

SGI invented OpenGL, the open standard API that allowed developers to write 3D code that could run on different hardware.

The 3D Accelerator Wars (1996-2000)

While SGI ruled the high end, PC gamers were suffering with software rendering (using the CPU). Then came 3dfx.

  • The Voodoo 1 (1996): It wasn’t a video card; it was a pure 3D accelerator. You needed a regular 2D card for Windows, and you used a “pass-through” cable to connect the Voodoo. When you launched Quake, the Voodoo clicked on and took over.
  • Impact: Before Voodoo, games were pixelated blocks. After Voodoo, they were smoothed (bilinear filtering) and fast.

NVIDIA entered the chat with the RIVA TNT and eventually the GeForce 256 (1999), which they coined as the first “GPU” because it handled Transform and Lighting (T&L) on the chip, freeing the CPU entirely. 3dfx eventually went bankrupt and was bought by NVIDIA.

The Programmable Pipeline: GPGPU

For a long time, GPUs were “fixed function.” They knew how to draw triangles and texture them. That was it. But developers realized that a GPU handles thousands of floating-point numbers in parallel.

  • 2006: The Revolution. NVIDIA released the GeForce 8800 GTX and CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture).
  • The Shift: Suddenly, the GPU wasn’t just for graphics. It was a massive parallel math co-processor. You could write C code that ran on the GPU cores.

Why This Matters for Security

This shift to GPGPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) changed hacking forever.

1. Password Cracking

Calculating an MD5 or SHA1 hash is a mathematical operation.

  • CPU: A high-end CPU has 16-32 cores. It can try 32 passwords at once.
  • GPU: An NVIDIA RTX 4090 has 16,384 CUDA cores. It can try thousands of passwords at once per clock cycle.
  • Hashcat: Tools like Hashcat leverage this to crunch billions of hashes per second. A password that took 10,000 years to crack on a CPU in 2000 takes minutes on a modern GPU rig.

2. Rainbow Tables

The storage capacity and speed of generating pre-computed hash chains (Rainbow Tables) exploded with GPU acceleration.

3. AI / Deepfakes

Modern social engineering threats like Deepfake audio and video are generated using GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) running on… you guessed it, GPUs.

Conclusion

The evolution of graphics is the evolution of parallel computing. The same technology built to render realistic explosions in Call of Duty is the technology used to brute-force your WiFi password. The SGI workstations are gone, collecting dust in museums, but their legacy—OpenGL and the push for dedicated math hardware—powers the offensive infrastructure of the future.

UncleSp1d3r