If we're arguing semantics, I feel like these early cards are more fitting to the "3D accelerator" name than the modern ones. They were specialized for accelera

If we're arguing semantics, I feel like these early cards are more fitting to the "3D accelerator" name than the modern ones. They were specialized for accelerating 3D graphics (which, in the end, means pushing triangles into a 2D framebuffer). Modern GPUs are more like general-purpose vector processors that happen to also be good at calculations related to 3D graphics and can (sometimes) render triangles to a framebuffer.