Nvidia CEO Says GeForce 3 Helped Lay the Foundation for Today’s AI Boom

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently reflected on a major milestone in the company’s history while celebrating the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 3 GPU. During the anniversary event with the GeForce team, Huang described the graphics card as a turning point that eventually helped lead to the modern AI era.

According to Huang, GeForce 3 represented a fundamental shift in how graphics processing worked.

GeForce 3 introduced programmable shaders

According to Wccftech, when GeForce 3 launched in the early 2000s, most GPUs relied on fixed-function graphics pipelines. These pipelines handled specific tasks in a predefined way, which limited what developers could do with visuals.

Huang explained that this approach often resulted in games looking similar because developers had little flexibility over how graphics were rendered.

GeForce 3 introduced programmable shaders, allowing developers to directly control parts of the graphics pipeline. Programmable vertex and pixel shaders allowed game studios to customize effects, lighting, and rendering behavior.

This shift gave developers far more artistic freedom and allowed games to experiment with new visual styles.

The path from gaming GPUs to CUDA and AI

Huang also connected the evolution of GPU graphics technology to the rise of modern artificial intelligence.

The programmable architecture introduced in GeForce 3 eventually helped lead to CUDA, NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform that allows GPUs to perform general-purpose workloads beyond graphics.

CUDA made GPUs useful for scientific computing, machine learning, and other workloads that require massive parallel processing.

Huang noted that this capability later became essential for AI development, since training neural networks relies heavily on parallel computation.

In simple terms, Huang described the progression as GeForce enabling CUDA, CUDA enabling AI, and AI enabling the technologies we see today.

Ray tracing and AI rendering technologies

Huang also highlighted ray tracing as another major leap in graphics technology.

Real-time ray tracing simulates how light behaves in the real world, producing more realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections. However, it requires immense computational power.

This demand led to the development of AI-assisted technologies such as DLSS, NVIDIA’s neural rendering and upscaling system that uses AI models to improve performance while maintaining image quality.

These technologies combine traditional graphics rendering with AI processing, showing how GPU development continues to merge gaming and artificial intelligence workloads.

NVIDIA continues expanding AI hardware

Although NVIDIA’s focus today is heavily centered on AI infrastructure, the company still sees gaming technology as an important part of its GPU roadmap.

Recent reports indicate that NVIDIA has begun sampling its upcoming Vera Rubin VR200 AI hardware platform to customers.

At the same time, gaming-related rumors suggest that NVIDIA could revisit older GPU products. Some industry reports claim the company might resume production of the RTX 3060 and introduce a new RTX 5050 model with 9GB of VRAM.

While these plans remain unconfirmed, they highlight NVIDIA’s continued presence across both gaming and AI markets.