Comment by whizzter

Computers themselves were non-consumer to begin with, but the Personal Computer broke the technology moat to consumers before anything else and once that had passed it was mostly a matter of time imho.

Many 3d games like doom, quake1, flight unlimited,etc ran purely on software rendering since CPU's were already providing enough oomph to render fairly useful 3d graphics in the mid 90s. CPU power was enough but consoles/arcades showed that there was more to be gotten (but nothing hindered games at that point).

And already there, the capital investment for game consoles (Atari,NES,SNES,PS1,PS2, etc) and arcade games(like the above mentioned 3d games) were big enough to use custom chipsets not used or purposed for anything else (I think also that in the 80s/90s the barrier of entry to making competitive custom chips was a tad lower, just consider the cambrian explosions of firms during the 90s making x86 and later ARM chips).

Yes, there was vendors that focused on the high end commercial customers, and yes many alumnis of those firms did contribute a ton of expertise towards what we have today.

But if you look at what companies survived and pushed the envelope in the longer run it was almost always companies that competed in the consumer market, and it was only when those consumer chips needed even more advanced processing that we breached the point where the chips became capable of NN's.

In fact I'd say that had the likes of SGI prevailed we would've had to wait longer for our GPU revolution. Flight simulators,etc were often focused on "larger/detailed" worlds, PS2-era chips with higher polycounts and more memory would have been fine for simulator developers for a long time (since more details in a military scenario would have been fine).

Leisure games has always craved fidelity on a more "human" level, to implement "hacks" for stuff with custom dynamic lighting models, then global illumination, subsurface scattering,etc we've needed the arbitrary programmability since the raw power wasn't there (the most modern raytracing chips are _starting_ to approach that levels without too ugly hacks).