Old school 3D accelerators are so charming due to their simplicity. No multiple cores, no schedulers, no programable shaders, just a basic fixed length predicta

Old school 3D accelerators are so charming due to their simplicity. No multiple cores, no schedulers, no programable shaders, just a basic fixed length predictable geometry and texture pipeline made of of vector processors, that's it. They were simple enough that the system integrators or board partners would actually be the ones writing the drivers for them as the company was just selling them the chips with the datasheets and manuals with instructions on how to interface with them via PCI and how to program them, that's it. NVidia were famous for being the first to in-house the driver development themselves instead of their board partners which gave them the edge on driver quality and performance.