History of video games/Computer games

Early Computer Games
See the chapters early games and Dr. Nim for early examples of computer games.

CPUs

 * 16 bit Intel 80286 (286) - 1982-1991
 * 32 bit Intel 80386 (386) - 1985-2007
 * 32 bit Intel 80486 (486) - 1989-2007

Regional Computers
In the 1980's there was a rivalry between Iraqi users of the Al Warkaa and the Sakhr 170 home gaming computers.

In Wales, Dragon computers were popular.

1990-1999
By 1990 well used dithering was being used in EGA games to create the illusion of better colors. From the early to late 1990's Color Cycling, the shifting of a palette on a still image, was used to produce resource efficient animations in computer games.

The 1990's saw the first common graphics cards, as well as the first common 3D API's for graphics cards such as Glide.

The introduction of CD-ROMs was initially seen as a way to reduce costs and piracy compared to floppy disks, though pirates quickly gained familiarity with the new format.

In 1994, the first Dreamhack was held in Malung, Sweden.

In 1996 the Marine Doom is made for US military training, a notable early use of FPS games for military training.

The Nvidia GeForce 256, considered as the world's first GPU, was released in 1999. It offered a huge improvement in 3D graphic capabilities.

2000-2009
Valve launches Steam on September 12th, 2003.

Audio Cards remain popular till the end of the decade in many high end gaming rigs, along with brief experiments in gaming themed network and physics acceleration cards.

Rise of Steam
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

In 2011 Valve identifies game piracy as a service problem. In 2013 Steam distributed 75% of digital games on PC.

In 2015 Steam and Bethesda briefly introduced paid mods as a feature, before quickly withdrawing it in response to widespread criticism.

Ray-tracing games started in 2018 and ray-tracing cards were released to be capable of ray-tracing in supported games. The first ray-tracing graphics cards were Nvidia RTX 2060, 2070, 2080, and Titan RTX.

2020-2029
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shortage of computer parts. Despite this the Folding@Home distributed computing project reaches quickly 1.5 Exaflops of capability as thousands of PC gamers donate unused cycles from their computers to tackle biomedical research in the fight against COVID-19.

The Trump Administration began enforcing a new tariff on computer components from China near the end of it's term in mid January 2021, causing GPU prices to significantly increase, sometimes by several hundred dollars.

Some manufactures experimented with PCs in handheld console formfactors. In 2022 Steam released the Steam Deck, which is a handheld console that runs PC games.

In 2022 Intel released its first graphics cards: the Arc A750 and A770. These GPUs supported RTX 3060 performance for cheaper prices in games, especially DirectX 12 ones. DirectX 9 support was improved on these GPUs in 2023.