[amy-petrik-214]

basically with all those bells and whistles (transform, lighting, clipping, shaders, etc, etc)

the "old way" was to engineer a bit of silicon for each one of those things, custom-like. problem was how much silicon to give to teach feature, it almost has to be fine-tuned to each individual game, a problem

So nvidia comes up with the idea to sort of have a pool of generic compute units, each of which can do T&L, or shading, etc. Now the problem of fine-tuning to a game is solved. but also now you have a mini compute array that can do math fast, a general-purpose unit of processing (GPU-OP), which was a nod from NVIDIA to the gaming community (OP - overpowered)