I'm thinking closer to 90s period, where "graphics cards" developed by Voodoo / 3dfx and its Glide API were clearly along the DirectX / OpenGL inspiration path.

I'm thinking closer to 90s period, where "graphics cards" developed by Voodoo / 3dfx and its Glide API were clearly along the DirectX / OpenGL inspiration path. (3d Graphics pipeline / transform & lightning / etc. etc.). I don't know the exact point when these 3d accelerators became programmable with vertex/pixel shaders, but Glide is clearly on the path and part of the history here. -------- You're right in that 80s / Arcade chips look to be different. Its a programmable graphics chip alright, but I wouldn't call that chip SIMD, not from what I can see from Wikipedia at least.