The Nvidia GeForce3 launched 25 years ago — underappreciated at launch, its impact shaped the industry

It’s easy to hear “25 years ago” and miss the context, so let’s talk about the context of the GeForce 3 launch. This was before Steam and before the iPhone. Before YouTube. The concept of the “GPU” was still quite novel, having been established with the GeForce256 just 15 months prior. Yes, we went from GeForce256 to GeForce2 to GeForce 3, all in just 15 months. Things moved more quickly back then; we went from 1 GHz to 2 GHz CPUs in roughly the same time.

When it launched in February of 2001, the GeForce 3 was a critical turning point in the history of graphics processors, as this was the first GPU to include any real sort of programmability by way of being the first GPU with DirectX 8.0 pixel and vertex shader support. What that means is that graphics programmers could now write programs that run on the GPU.

This sounds insane from a modern perspective; what do you mean, early graphics processors couldn’t run programs? But it’s true; before the GeForce 3, virtually all graphics processors were “dumb” fixed-function accelerators. You would hand them data in a specific format from the CPU, they would do their magic, and then output the modified framebuffer. Any code you wrote ran on the CPU, which meant that any special graphical effects you wanted had to be performed on the CPU.