NVIDIA CEO celebrates 25 years of GeForce 3, says 'without GeForce' there's 'no AI'

This year, the iconic GeForce 3, introduced in February 2001, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. More than just an interactive update, the GeForce 3 introduced programmable pixel and vertex shaders, paving the way for modern PC and console gaming. Some of the PC games that defined the GPU and that generation include id Software's Doom 3, with its groundbreaking per-pixel lighting, and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which featured incredible water effects for its time.

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And with that, taking a break from preparing for his big NVIDIA GTC 2026 opening keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang sat down with senior members of the GeForce team to discuss the importance of the GeForce 3 and its legacy. Not only that, but the GeForce 3 was instrumental in transforming NVIDIA into a computing company and the global leader in AI.

"Every game looked the same, looked heavily filtered, everything was bilinear and trilinear filtered," Jensen Huang says of the era before the GeForce 3 arrived in 2001. "We felt that games weren't like CAD; games are a medium for artistic expression, and if you look at all these different games, we wanted them all to look different."

"To look different, you need the ability to express artistry in some form of program," Jensen Huang continues. "It can be pre-coded. And our company really didn't have a whole lot of compiler technology. And so as we were transitioning from a fixed hardware-accelerated pipeline to a fixed hardware-accelerated pipeline, we realised that we had to move into and become a computing company."

And from there, we got CUDA, more advanced rendering technologies, and eventually the arrival of GeForce RTX with its AI Tensor Cores and DLSS. "One of the things that I'm very proud of is the big risk that we took to take the world into ray tracing," Jensen Huang says. "It's so computationally intensive. We took a giant step back in frame rate, which required artificial intelligence to bring us forward. And as you know, when we work on something, we work on it, literally, for as long as we shall live."

"Without GeForce there would be no CUDA, without CUDA, there would be no AI, without AI, there would be no today," Jensen Huang concludes.