Nvidia was selling cards with hardware acceleration since 1997. The first one I own is from 1998, and its advantage wasn't that it had superior compute, but tha

Nvidia was selling cards with hardware acceleration since 1997. The first one I own is from 1998, and its advantage wasn't that it had superior compute, but that it also included the non-3d circuitry of the rest of the video card. So instead of having a 2d card and a Voodoo, which were daisy chained, you could use that a lone Riva TNT that will do both. So they started being less about compute than the competition. Between the first nvidia cards and the first release of CUDA, you have a decade.