The first video card with a programmable pixel shader was the Nvidia GeForce 3 (NV20) --- These early efforts to use GPUs as general-purpose processors requir

The first video card with a programmable pixel shader was the Nvidia GeForce 3 (NV20) --- These early efforts to use GPUs as general-purpose processors required reformulating computational problems in terms of graphics primitives, as supported by the two major APIs for graphics processors, OpenGL and DirectX. This cumbersome translation was obviated by the advent of general-purpose programming languages and APIs such as Sh/RapidMind, Brook and Accelerator.[8][9] These were followed by Nvidia's CUDA, which allowed programmers to ignore the underlying graphical concepts in favor of more common high-performance computing concepts.[