its a very honorable mention in my eyes because its more appropriate of the tile of "first independent Graphics unit" than the Geforce 2. (did more than just blast already projected triangles at the screen)

not that it was an awesome product, but certainly it was flexible.

a good (albeit tiny) demo of that is that vquake has the same wobbling water distortion of the software renderer quake but rendered entirely through the gpu. Perhaps with some interpretation this could be called the "caveman discovered fire" of the pixel shading era.