SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
Wolfenstein 3d was released before 3DFx existed, was purely CPU rendered, and generally considered the father of modern 3d shooters. Even without the scientific computing angle, GPUs would have been developed for gaming simply because it was a good idea that clearly had a big market.
Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga.
Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind of computation needed for neural networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could have.
> Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips
Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case.
Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications.
No question that chip companies are happy to take consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of a new technology which was invented and marketed to consumers first.
It's symbiotic, I suppose.
3dfx didnt. They had a subsidiary? spinoff? Quantum3D that reused 3dfx commodity chips to build cards for simulators.