I vaguely recall (many years ago) some GPU (a Matrox one iirc) coming out and it being a huge deal because of how many transistors it had. I think it may have been an amazing 100 million. Times have changed :D
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lith...
You're misremembering. Matrox cards were also terribly slow in DOS and anything adjacent to 3D. I own several models with SGRAM. Even GeForce 2 GTS: 25m transistors. G200: 10m. Voodoo2: 4m.
Nope, it was the Parhelia released in 2002 - so somewhat later than the hardware you're considering. The Parhelia was what I was thinking of, with a truly insane number of transistors: 80 million! ("something like" was bearing quite a lot of weight in my first comment :D ). However it was only in the same ballpark, not actually faster that the Geforce 4 Ti or the Radeon 8500, and it was more expensive, so failed in the market.
The relevant anandtech review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/936 (post 936, vs this week's Qualcomm which is post 21112 :D )