IMHO, the starting point was the requirement of 3D accelerated video cards. The last 3D games I have played (alone in the dark 1, doom) did not require any 3D c

IMHO, the starting point was the requirement of 3D accelerated video cards. The last 3D games I have played (alone in the dark 1, doom) did not require any 3D card. But now, you can't display a line of text without a huge pile of crappy layers above insane GPU. 25year ago, direct video memory mapping and bitblt operations were sufficient.