What would an off the shelf video card look like?

[StephenHorn]

Even the SNES relied on fixed-function hardware with the S-PPU setup, and that had the famous Mode 7 graphics. Though technically implemented as two different physical chips, a programmer treats them as a single chip, and they were not "programmable" in the same sense as being able to execute semi-arbitrary sets of commands.

Although the term "Shader" dates back to 1988, according to Wikipedia, the first GPU to introduce a programmable pipeline was the Nvidia GeForce 3, released in 2001. Even then, this was limited to the pixel shader, meaning the geometry in a 3D scene had to be fully spelled out to the GPU in a predetermined pattern of bytes, just like how raster data is spelled out in a bitmap layer on the VERA. Full, general-purpose programming on GPUs wouldn't arrive until even later, and CUDA only dates back to 2007. I wonder if they're still using shims to translate the shader work into graphics primitives to "trick" the GPU into doing the work as if it were rendering a 3D scene.