NV10's T&L engine also allowed Nvidia to enter the CAD market with dedicated cards for the first time, with a product called Quadro.

The Quadro line uses the same silicon chips as the GeForce cards, but has different driver support and certifications tailored to the unique requirements of CAD applications.

The later release and widespread adoption of GeForce 2 MX/4 MX cards with the same feature set meant unusually long support for the GeForce 256, until approximately 2006, in games such as Star Wars: Empire at War or Half-Life 2, the latter of which featured a Direct3D 7-compatible path, using a subset of Direct3D 9 to target the fixed-function pipeline of these GPUs.

Early drivers were buggy and slow, while 3dfx cards enjoyed efficient, high-speed, mature Glide API and/or MiniGL support for the majority of games.

Additionally, some GeForce cards were plagued with poor analog signal circuitry, which caused display output to be blurry.

This changed the way the graphics market functioned, encouraging shorter graphics-card lifetimes and placing less emphasis on the CPU for gaming.