Loooong before that in the German magazine Elektor (Elektuur in the netherlands) there was a series of articles describing a (2D) Graphics Display Processor aka a blitter.

https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-198510/4685...

I got the kit, built it and wrote a driver for my BBC micro for it and the speed was - for those days - phenomenal. The 6502 to do some matrix math and suddenly I had rotating cubes on a screen, it felt like heaven. Later I got into more fancy hardware and had SGI stuff to play with (far more powerful) but I did not take it with me to Canada.

And in the very early days of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrookGPU I used an NVIDIA card to help me work through a massive number of voxels to render the result of a mill bit running through a wood blank in real time. I loved that little card and I still have it somewhere. Without that little bit of code I would have wasted a lot more wood making my windmill.