Interestingly, the way nVidia achieved this is that they were one of the first successful users of RTL simulation. They would design their chips to work in simu

Interestingly, the way nVidia achieved this is that they were one of the first successful users of RTL simulation. They would design their chips to work in simulation, and then instantly order a full production batch without any physical test articles. This was thought to be entirely insane at the time. The reason they did this, was that for the first few generations of their chips, the company was constantly near bankruptcy and they simply could not afford the payroll for the time it would take to get test samples out and debugged. So they just placed their trust in an unproved technology and prayed. If the simulations would have failed and anything before GeForce had bugs you couldn't work around in drivers (and they all had a lot of bugs), the company would have likely gone under.