Unified shader model

This lowered the cost of implementation of the GPU as a whole, and allowed more shaders in total on a single unit.

This was at the cost of making the system less flexible, and sometimes leaving one set of shaders idle if the workload used one more than the other.

AMD introduced a unified shader in card form two years later in the TeraScale line.

[1] Unified shader architecture (or unified shading architecture) is a hardware design by which all shader processing units of a piece of graphics hardware are capable of handling any type of shading tasks.

Unified shader architecture allows more flexible use of the graphics rendering hardware.