SM3.0 has been around for years since the Geforce6 in case of Nvidia and the Radeon X1*00 for ATI. Stefan his patches allow you to use SM3.0 using 'ARB' + NV extensions on Nvidia hardware without GLSL and it allows SM2.0 on non-nvidia cards if they provide sufficient ARB shader support on lets say a Radeon 9500/GeforceFX and up, so quite old cards.
