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With the advent of the OpenGL API and similar functionality in DirectX, GPUs added programmable shading to their capabilities. ...
Nvidia was first to produce a chip capable of programmable shading, the GeForce 3 (code named NV20).
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Recent developments in GPUs include support for programmable shaders which can manipulate vertices and textures with many of the same operations supported by CPUs, oversampling and interpolation techniques to reduce aliasing, and very high-precision color spaces. Because most of these computations involve matrix and vector operations, engineers and scientists have increasingly studied the use of GPUs for non-graphical calculations. An example of GPUs being used non-graphically is the generation of Bitcoins, where the graphical processing unit is used to solve hash functions.