Aaah the ever so lovely GeForce series 3. This is the GeForce3 Titanium 200. Mid-October 2001 it would cost roughly $199 for a GeForce3 Titanium.  200 GPUs were made on TSMC’s .15 micron technology. The card ran at 175 MHz on the core and 400 MHz on the memory

Here's the timeframe where thing started really picking up for ATI as well. This is the ATI Radeon 8500. The card was operating at a core clock speed of 275 MHz (megahertz) and a memory clock speed of 275 MHz. Equipped with 64MB of DDR (double data rate) memory, targeted against the GeForce series 3 Ti 200 and Ti 500.

This was a serious and high-ed card. it was also the time-frame where ATI's All in Wonder cards started to become popular. These cards had video in and out, as well as SD TV support.

We are now in the 2002 timeframe. Guillemot was renamed to Hercules, and they really got their groove on even by pimping graphics cards with colored PCB, nice coolers and ram sinks. This was their Hercules 3D Prophet 9000 Pro 128MB, based on the budget ATI Radeon 9000 Pro.

Months later ATi released the legendary Radeon 9700 and 9800 series of graphics cards. Which unfortunately is a card I could not find in my collection. It should be there though, I'll stumble into it some day.

April 2002, NVIDIA unleashed GeForce series 4. Does anyone remember it? GeForce 4 Ti 4200 folks, NV25. It had 4ns DDR memory at 500 MHz and a 275 MHz core clock. It was so incredibly popular. The memory bandwidth back then, 8000 MB/sec