It's not the world's first ray-tracing GPU. Imagination Technologies had one ages ago.
> NVIDIA invents the graphics processing unit, putting it on a path to reshape the industry. GeForce 256 is launched as the world's first GPU, a term NVIDIA defines as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second. [1]
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/corporate-timeline...
Even 3Dfx, the chief competitor to NVIDIA, made “graphics cards” or “3D accelerators” not “GPUs”. At least in that fight NVIDIA used the GPU term first, to emphasize that hey did transformation and lightning as well as rasterization. Although it wasn’t until a few generations later with the first register programmed GeForce architectures that we had anything resembling what we call GPUs today.
In a parallel universe where 3dfx survived and thrived, maybe they would be defining FSAA to be an important part of the first modern "GPU"
Register-programmed T&L on the other hand was the first programmable SIMD shader pathway. After Stanford showed[1] somewhat remarkably in 2000-2001 that it was powerful enough to be the target of a RenderMan-like shader language, it pushed architectures towards full programmability.
Now we think of the "GPU" as a vector processing unit able to run arbitrary kernels across massively parallel data sets, with high bandwidth connections to its own high-speed RAM. The fact this is useful for real time graphics rendering is almost incidental, as TFA demonstrates. That whole revolution, and the impact it had on scientific compute, machine learning, and much else, began with the first register-programmable GeForce (the GeForce 2 I believe? But Wikipedia says the GeForce 256 supported the same architectural feature, but was just not user accessible).
[1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ Although pursuing the website it looks like it was a general OpenGL 1.1 pipeline, rather than using the NVIDIA extensions as I remember. However these were translated by NVIDIA's driver into register presets for the hardware T&L engine.
A search indicates many uses of the GPU term.
Besides the increase in raw compute, what is materially different this time around?
Caustic Graphics as well, IIRC.