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What is so hard to believe? Technology evolves rapidly. I can't imagine that anyone investing big money in compute technology wouldn't have expected that.

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Because that happened in a time when there were many players in the 90s each making their own GPUs for gaming purposes specifically. Compute was not even on the picture until things like CUDA and OpenCL came out.

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.

You do understand nVidia dates back to fixed pipeline accelerators for essentially some vertices and textures, right?

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