Hearing the phrase "25 years ago" can easily lead to overlooking the context, so let's talk about the background of the GeForce 3's release. There was no Steam, no iPhone, and certainly no YouTube. The concept of a "GPU" was still very novel; the GeForce 256 had only been officially released 15 months earlier.

That's right, it only took us 15 months to go from the GeForce 256 to the GeForce 2 and then to the GeForce 3. Technology was developing much faster back then; the upgrade from 1GHz to 2GHz CPUs took about the same amount of time.

About GeForce 3

Released in February 2001, the GeForce 3 was a pivotal turning point in the history of graphics processing units (GPUs). It was the first truly programmable GPU, supporting DirectX 8.0 pixel and vertex shaders. This meant graphics programmers could now write programs that ran on the GPU.

From a modern perspective, this sounds incredible; what? Early GPUs couldn't run programs? But it was true; before the GeForce 3, almost all GPUs were "dumb" fixed-function accelerators. You had to pass data to the CPU in a specific format, they would process it, and then output a modified framebuffer. Any code you wrote ran on the CPU, meaning any special graphics effects you wanted had to be implemented on the CPU.

Hearing the phrase "25 years ago" can easily lead to misunderstandings, so let's talk about the context of the GeForce 3's release. There was no Steam, no iPhone, and no YouTube. The concept of a "GPU" was still novel; the GeForce 256 had only been officially released 15 months earlier. That's right, it only took us 15 months to go from GeForce 256 to GeForce 2 and then to GeForce 3. Technology was developing much faster back then; the upgrade from 1GHz to 2GHz CPUs took about the same amount of time.

The influence of GeForce 3

Released in February 2001, the GeForce 3 marked a pivotal turning point in the history of graphics processing units (GPUs). It was the first truly programmable GPU, supporting DirectX 8.0 pixel and vertex shaders. This meant graphics programmers could now write programs that ran on the GPU.

From a modern perspective, this sounds incredible; what? Early GPUs couldn't run programs? But it was true; before the GeForce 3, almost all GPUs were "dumb" fixed-function accelerators. You needed to pass data to the CPU in a specific format, which they would process and output a modified framebuffer. Any code you wrote ran on the CPU, meaning any special graphics effects you wanted had to be implemented on the CPU.

As you can see, the GeForce 3 boasts powerful DirectX 8 graphics capabilities, but its raw rasterization performance (fill rate) is exactly the same as the GeForce 2 Pro. Its only real advantage in DirectX 7 and earlier games lies in its "light-speed memory architecture," a then-advanced cross-switch memory controller that significantly boosted effective memory bandwidth. This gives it a noticeable performance advantage at high resolutions, but if you only care about Quake III Arena at 800x600 resolution, its performance is underwhelming.

GeForce 3 Ti500

The release of the GeForce 3 Ti500 in 2001 partially addressed this shortcoming. Indeed, the GeForce 3 is the origin of the "Ti" suffix still used on NVIDIA graphics cards today. Whether you pronounce it "tie" or "tee-aye," it originally referred to the "Titanium Edition" and was used in October 2001 for two new GeForce 3 models and one GeForce 2 model, which was NVIDIA's entry-level product at the time. The GeForce 2 Ti offered excellent value for money in classic games, but it lacked the future-proof advantages of the GeForce 3 Ti200. The lack of DX8 support meant you couldn't select the "Shiny Waters" option in *The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind*, significantly diminishing the appeal of the previous generation of GeForce graphics cards.

Another product released at the end of 2001—the Microsoft Xbox—solidified the GeForce 3's position as a cornerstone of future game consoles. The original Xbox is best known for its NVIDIA graphics card, but less known is that NVIDIA also provided the console's audio hardware and memory controller. NVIDIA's contributions to the Xbox also formed the basis for its acclaimed but relatively short-lived "nForce" series of motherboard chipsets. The Xbox was undoubtedly the most powerful game console of its time, boasting more memory and more advanced graphics processing capabilities than its Nintendo and Sony counterparts. However, without software, a game console is meaningless. While the Xbox had some outstanding games (including Halo: Combat Evolved, Fable, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic), it was not a market leader.

Admittedly, the market often punishes forward-thinking hardware in the short term, but long-term development is key. The GeForce 3 itself wasn't a very successful product for NVIDIA, but it was quickly superseded by the popular GeForce 4 series. The GeForce 4 continued the excellent tradition of the GeForce 3 and upgraded Direct3D support from version 8.0 to 8.1. This adds features such as volumetric textures (3D textures) and dependent texture reading, the latter allowing the GPU to use the color data of one texture to calculate the coordinates of another. Of course, the real generational leap lies in the expansion of pixel and vertex shader capabilities, as well as the significant increase in pure rasterization throughput and memory bandwidth.

Pixel and vertex shader hardware

In the following years, pixel and vertex shader hardware became a major area of development and advancement for GPUs. The GeForce 6 series graphics cards, released in April 2004, introduced DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0, bringing "smart shaders"—true dynamic flow control within GPU programs. This meant developers could begin writing "super shaders" that handled different material types in a single program without reducing frame rates. It also introduced vertex texture fetching for displacement mapping, hydraulic geometry stampancing for rendering dense grass and forests, and HDR rendering, resulting in more realistic lighting effects.

But what truly revolutionized things was the GeForce 8 series. Released with great fanfare in late 2006, the GeForce 8 series marked the birth of the Tesla microarchitecture. Tesla was NVIDIA's first design to adopt a fully unified shader. This meant that pixel and vertex shaders were no longer separate; the GPU was now a fully programmable processor, significantly reducing previous limitations. The simultaneous release of the GeForce 8 series and the first version of NVIDIA's proprietary computing framework CUDA is no coincidence.

This is the crux of the matter. From the release of GeForce 3 to NVIDIA's current dominance in the artificial intelligence market, we can find a clear trajectory. When millions of PCs worldwide were equipped with massively parallel programmable processors, people began to wonder what programs they could run besides games. General-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) emerged. Initially, they were primarily used for scientific computing, Folding@home, physics simulations, and academic research. Subsequently, cryptography and cryptocurrencies rose to prominence; readers may recall the GPU shortages caused by the cryptocurrency boom. Today, it is almost entirely applied to the field of artificial intelligence.

The peculiarity of technological evolution is that it often doesn't seem important in the present. In fact, sometimes it even seems like a regression. The foundation laid by GeForce 3 is crucial. It bet that graphics hardware should be programmable, putting NVIDIA ahead of other vendors in this area. 25 years later, this bet is driving the world's most powerful AI data centers, all because gamers wanted better game lighting effects. The GeForce 3 wasn't the fastest graphics card in games at the time, but it was the first graphics card designed for the future, and the scope of "future" was very, very broad.

Source: Compiled from tomshardware

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