Introduced in February 2001,[1] it advanced the GeForce architecture by adding programmable pixel and vertex shaders, multisample anti-aliasing and improved the overall efficiency of the rendering process.

The GeForce 3 was unveiled during the 2001 Macworld Conference & Expo/Tokyo 2001 in Makuhari Messe and powered realtime demos of Pixar's Junior Lamp and id Software's Doom 3.

A separate professional version, with a feature-set tailored for computer aided design, was sold as the Quadro DCC.

It is believed that the fixed-function T&L hardware from GeForce 2 was still included on the chip for use with Direct3D 7.0 applications, as the single vertex shader was not fast enough to emulate it yet.

This is composed of several mechanisms that reduce overdraw, conserve memory bandwidth by compressing the z-buffer (depth buffer) and better manage interaction with the DRAM.

Previous GeForce chips could perform only super-sampled anti-aliasing (SSAA), a demanding process that renders the image at a large size internally and then scales it down to the end output resolution.

With multi-sampling, the render output units super-sample only the Z-buffers and stencil buffers, and using that information get greater geometry detail needed to determine if a pixel covers more than one polygonal object.

However, when comparing anti-aliasing performance the GeForce 3 is clearly superior because of its MSAA support and memory bandwidth/fillrate management efficiency.

The Ti200 is clocked lower (175 MHz/200 MHz) making it the lowest-priced GeForce 3 release, but it still surpasses the Radeon 7500 in speed and feature set although lacking dual-monitor implementation.