An interesting tid-bit I saw over at 3DGPU.
It appears that the people who responded to Tom regarding Shadow Mapping were either ignorant of all the facts, or chose to conceal them. While shadow buffering support in Direct3D may have only just been added in Detonator XP, the OpenGL drivers have supported it since the GeForce3's original introduction (or at the very least, they have supported it for many months now). There has been sample code utilizing the Geforce3's shadow buffer support in the OpenGL section of their developer site for quite some time.
In addition to the Shadow Mapping presentation dated 08/10/2001 (https://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=shadow_mapping), there is a white paper on Interactive Order-Independent Transparency (https://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=Interactive_Order_Transparency) which uses the same Shadow Mapping extensions to achieve its results dated 05/15/2001. There is also source code for this order-independent transparency in the OpenGL SDK samples. I actually ran the transparency demo months ago (June or July) on my GeForce3, so I know for a fact that it really did work prior to the DetonatorXP's. Both of these pages specifically state that a GeForce3 is required in order to make use of the new shadow mapping features present in the GeForce3.
News source: 3DGPU
