[froonly]

Back in the late 90s, there was a project at SGI, called Bali, to make all their pipelines work in IEEE 32-bit floating point (they were using Intel i860 chips) so that they could do HW rendering of scenes written in Pixar's Renderman language.

Sony copied that idea for the 1st Playstation, and then folks like NVidia & 3DLabs quickly followed suit, the idea being they would enable that functionality for games like Final Fantasy.

In the early 2000s, the HPC folks realized that you could use a GPU for physics & engineering codes, and here were are 20 yrs later.