Jensen Huang reflects on 25 years of the GeForce 3

In a YouTube video marking the card's 25th anniversary, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang looked back on the launch of the GeForce 3 and its place in the company's history. He said Nvidia had "introduced really the first successful mainstream graphics accelerator, Riva 128 and subsequently Riva TNT, Riva TNT2," and praised the decision to focus on a specific stage of the graphics pipeline.

"That entire pipeline stage, including the intense memory traffic, the texture processing, all of that was done in hardware," he explained. The GeForce 3 brought pixel shaders and a more flexible architecture that Huang says allowed game developers a new level of creative freedom, noting that artists in games "can't be pre-coded." He contrasted the card's 30 million transistors with the several hundred billion transistors in modern chips, underscoring how much the technology has changed.

Power consumption has shifted dramatically as well. Huang asked, "This is what? 35 watts?

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