Dedicated GPU would be the GeForce 256 SDR version (CL Annihilator). It was rushed in late '99, the real DDR version (Annihilator Pro) came out a few months later.
Discrete video as they called them, well back in the days of the PC you had 8 and 16 bit ISA slots. Motherboards typically had NOTHING onboard except the keyboard controller. Add in cards for floppy, HDD (SCSI/ESDI/IDE), Adlib/SoundBlaster, i/o for dual serial, single parallel and of course a VGA card. I think mine was a Trident display card capable of 1024x768 with 256 colors. VESA local bus (VLB) brought in much faster graphics and true color: The Stealth 32 (TSENG 4000) VLB. Then the Diamond Speedstar 64, Stealth64 and Stealth64 video that had hardware MPEG capability. That was in '94/'95. PCI was quickly replacing VLB on early socket 5 systems.
I loved the 3dFX add on boards (STB/Monster/etc) but HATED how the included passthrough cables killed the crispness of text. I ran a Hitachi 21" CRT at 1600x1200 85Hz refresh on a Matrox Millennium II with 8MB WRAM. It looked great without that cable. Speaking of Matrox they had a M3D add on card that shipped with a racing game called Ultim@te Race Pro. That ran and played great on my Dual Pentium Pro 200! The card didn't work very well and was missing features that were painfully evident when running Remedy's Final Reality benchmark.
I tried several other products. The Voodoo2 with 12MB was nice and with a decent passthrough cable the signal degradation wasn't so bad. Even had a Quantum 24MB SLI board that was expensive and fast for the time.
The Matrox G200 was nice for 2D, pin sharp text but 3D lacking. TNT 16MB AGP cards were screamers but had poor 2D signal quality. The Analog 2D issue persisted through GeForce2 days as well. Some modified their boards by bypassing components with jumper wires for a cleaner signal. The Prophet 3D Geforce 2 64MB had DVI but no monitors supported it or its 400MHz RAMDAC without adapters. I did manage to get some converters to 13W3 analog on my workstation displays supporting 85Hz 2048x1536 and it looked great but 2D fill speed seemed lacking...
Things are so much easier now.