That's not true. Loads of stuff is offloaded to GPU, which would cause a complete crash if it didn't work. GPUs aren't just layering rasters on top of each other.
Drivers that prioritize accuracy, and ECC ram fall well within the realm of "lower threshold for error", and price discrimination is covered by my parenthetical.
That said, the reason that custom SoCs are often less expensive than mass market cards is just because they have fewer things on them. If you don't need an FPU (which you obviously do here, but as an example), you can leave it off, which saves silicon and saves money. General purpose cards needs general purpose things, but a custom chip can often leave out certain components, although I don't know which ones those might be in this case.
It is true. Workstation graphics cards often have ECC memory, consumer cards don't. The biggest difference in most use though is better fp64 support on workstation cards, important for CAD applications as well as some use cases with 3D animated films or special effects.
Drivers that prioritize accuracy, and ECC ram fall well within the realm of "lower threshold for error", and price discrimination is covered by my parenthetical.
That said, the reason that custom SoCs are often less expensive than mass market cards is just because they have fewer things on them. If you don't need an FPU (which you obviously do here, but as an example), you can leave it off, which saves silicon and saves money. General purpose cards needs general purpose things, but a custom chip can often leave out certain components, although I don't know which ones those might be in this case.