Yes, definitely. IIRC, the fixed-function aspect is where NVIDIA's marketing made the distinction between their "GPU"s and the graphics accelerators that had g

Yes, definitely. IIRC, the fixed-function aspect is where NVIDIA's marketing made the distinction between their "GPU"s and the graphics accelerators that had gone before. That sort of thing would have tied in nicely with a discussion of the evolution of shading languages if this book had had such. And credit where it's due: I believe that NVIDIA also led the way on going from abusing the graphics pipeline to do GPGPU compute workloads to opening it up to much cleaner approaches like CUDA.