Well, GPUs in a modern understanding didn't came till GF4/GF4MX, when you could get something for less than $50.. at this moment MMX wasn't anywhere because SSE was. At this point you had an overlay display for the DivX/XviD and your average CPU could display the realtime video.

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monocasa 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It came from GF3, which had full vertex and pixel shaders.

Also, the GF4MX was just a GeForce256 in a trenchcoat, and didn't have vertex shaders (at least exposed to software, the T&L engine was still a vertex shader like engine, only the code was all written by nvidia and loaded from ROM).

	▲	justsomehnguy 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well yes but no. GF3 was a very short lived product, even more short lived than GF2MX. And the crucial thing here is what at the time of GF/GF2 you still could buy a computer without a proper[0] 3D and video output acceleration[1], but by the time of GF4MX (which is GF2MX on the booster shoes and VPE - and only a year and half later at the worst) you have no option not to get a full package. SIS died, 3Dfx died even earlier, S3 became irrelevant and Intel was for the button pushers till i945 - which came only in 2005. And while at first the price even for GF4MX420 was ~$100 it did two things: - pushed the price for GF2MX series well below $50 (and quite soon followed the suit) so anything now had DX7 level 3D on-board - pushed the price for every other 3D accelerator waaay down - made MPEG and video acceleration the default in everything [0] emphasis on the 'proper' [1] though you needed to get out of the way to do so, eg i815, G450 - but you could!