Eight milestones that shaped digital graphics — from 1960s vector plotters to real-time AI rendering. Scroll to travel sideways through time.
Basic vector graphics used in scientific research and simulations. Lines plotted one stroke at a time on oscilloscopes and pen plotters — the first moving images on a screen.
Pixel-based images introduced, enabling detailed digital pictures. Frame buffers, sprites, and the first 256-colour palettes brought graphics into homes and arcades.
Use of CGI in films and early 3D games increased realism. Texture mapping, Gouraud shading and Z-buffering turned polygons into worlds audiences could believe in.
Tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and Blender became widely used. Professional design left the studio and arrived on personal desktops, open-source and all.
Advanced GPUs enabled real-time graphics in games and simulations. Programmable shaders, deferred rendering and physically-based materials became standard on consumer hardware.
AI tools began generating and enhancing digital images. Style transfer, super-resolution and denoising quietly slipped into everyday design software.
Generative AI models became widely used in design workflows. A single prompt could produce a finished illustration — and a fresh debate about authorship, copyright and craft.
AI, real-time rendering and immersive technologies combine to produce faster, more realistic digital graphics. Neural rendering meets the GPU, and the two stop being separate things.
Neural radiance fields, holographic displays, ambient spatial computing, and graphics pipelines we haven't named yet. The next chapter is being written right now.