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The original GeForce had hardware transform and lighting (T&L), but lacked FSAA. The Voodoo5, vice-versa. In a parallel universe where 3dfx survived and thrive

• garmaine 8y ago
  No, that's kinda a dead-end evolutionary pathway. 3dfx's "FSAA" was, essentially, render at 4x the resolution and down-sample at the DAC. Sure, that works, but about the only thing it does is FSAA or motion blur (but not both, selectively). Register-programmed T&L on the other hand was the first programmable SIMD shader pathway. After Stanford showed[1] somewhat remarkably in 2000-2001 that it was powerful enough to be the target of a RenderMan-like shader language, it pushed architectures towards full programmability. Now we think of the "GPU" as a vector processing unit able to run arbitrary kernels across massively parallel data sets, with high bandwidth connections to its own high-speed RAM. The fact this is useful for real time graphics rendering is almost incidental, as TFA demonstrates. That whole revolution, and the impact it had on scientific compute, machine learning, and much else, began with the first register-programmable GeForce (the GeForce 2 I believe? But Wikipedia says the GeForce 256 supported the same architectural feature, but was just not user accessible). [1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ Although pursuing the website it looks like it was a general OpenGL 1.1 pipeline, rather than using the NVIDIA extensions as I remember. However these were translated by NVIDIA's driver into register presets for the hardware T&L engine.