alt Hacker NewsWell, GPUs in a modern understanding didn't came till GF4/GF4MX, when you could get something for less than $50.. at this moment MMX wasn't anywhere because SSE was. At this point you had an overlay display for the DivX/XviD and your average CPU could display the realtime video.
It came from GF3, which had full vertex and pixel shaders.
Also, the GF4MX was just a GeForce256 in a trenchcoat, and didn't have vertex shaders (at least exposed to software, the T&L engine was still a vertex shader like engine, only the code was all written by nvidia and loaded from ROM).