Originally slated for release late last year, the GeForce 3 was mysteriously delayed until the end of February, with NVIDIA refusing to comment on the delay. Naturally, this got the rumor mill churning, spawning reports ranging from design flaws in the chip to NVIDIA using the delay for more strategically motivated reasons.

Even after the chip was finally officially announced, test samples were hard to come by and also took quite a while to make their way to the usual sites. The few early sample boards that did pop up here and there were declared "non-final" and "unstable" by NVIDIA and their performance openly questioned, probably in an attempt at damage control should these renegade cards not perform as expected (especially after the hype they had been receiving). It took until mid May for GeForce 3 boards to finally become available in reasonable quantities. Meanwhile, NVIDIA hasn’t offered any explanations for this delay, and by the looks of things we shouldn’t be expecting one anytime soon either. The most likely reasons are immature/unstable drivers and/or problems with the early board designs.