I'm not sure whether this is the reason in this case, but it's worth noting that NVIDIA marketing (ab)uses the term "GPU" in a very particular way. Basically, their definition is contrived to make the GeForce 256 the first GPU ever.
> NVIDIA invents the graphics processing unit, putting it on a path to reshape the industry. GeForce 256 is launched as the world's first GPU, a term NVIDIA defines as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second. [1]
They definitely popularized it, but they didn't invent it. The graphics chip of the PlayStation was referred to as the "GPU" at least as far back as 1995, and I don't think NVIDIA had any involvement in its development or marketing (although the company was founded early enough for that to have been possible).
It had a "Tom" chip. The question is to whether they called it a GPU. I think they called it DSP back then.
Even 3Dfx, the chief competitor to NVIDIA, made “graphics cards” or “3D accelerators” not “GPUs”. At least in that fight NVIDIA used the GPU term first, to emphasize that hey did transformation and lightning as well as rasterization. Although it wasn’t until a few generations later with the first register programmed GeForce architectures that we had anything resembling what we call GPUs today.
No, that's kinda a dead-end evolutionary pathway. 3dfx's "FSAA" was, essentially, render at 4x the resolution and down-sample at the DAC. Sure, that works, but about the only thing it does is FSAA or motion blur (but not both, selectively).
Register-programmed T&L on the other hand was the first programmable SIMD shader pathway. After Stanford showed[1] somewhat remarkably in 2000-2001 that it was powerful enough to be the target of a RenderMan-like shader language, it pushed architectures towards full programmability.
Now we think of the "GPU" as a vector processing unit able to run arbitrary kernels across massively parallel data sets, with high bandwidth connections to its own high-speed RAM. The fact this is useful for real time graphics rendering is almost incidental, as TFA demonstrates. That whole revolution, and the impact it had on scientific compute, machine learning, and much else, began with the first register-programmable GeForce (the GeForce 2 I believe? But Wikipedia says the GeForce 256 supported the same architectural feature, but was just not user accessible).
[1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ Although pursuing the website it looks like it was a general OpenGL 1.1 pipeline, rather than using the NVIDIA extensions as I remember. However these were translated by NVIDIA's driver into register presets for the hardware T&L engine.
Hardware acceleration of BVH traversal and tight integration with the shader cores to allow efficient scheduling of shader execution and new ray generation when ray hits are detected.
While the 4800 series Radeon cards supported fully ray-traced pipelines it wasn't necessarily dedicated to it. These have a section of the chip entirely dedicated to ray-tracing computations and acceleration.
Caustic Technologies had this in 2000 and then Arm bought them. I believe the date of 2018 as the release by NVIDIA is actually related to the Caustic Technologies patents expiring.
https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/