> To try and claim companies like Nvidia and AMD didn't release 3d cards on the PC for > primarily gaming resons, is just a breathtaking rewriting of history. > > Whether that's their primary purpose today is irrelevant, as the use they're being > put to, that you describe, came later, much later.
I'm not rewriting history. You said that HLSL was not performing the primary purpose of GPUs, which you believe is drawing polygons. I pointed out that drawing polygons is no longer the primary purpose of GPUs, and is not even their primary design intent now. (This is even true in gaming, by the way: modern PC games can and do run physics, collision detection, AI, and data decompression on the GPU). GPUs have evolved in the direction of becoming massively-parallel general purpose CPUs that have hardware texture lookup acceleration. This all makes them far more amenable to how MAME likes to work.
Incidentally, HLSL is currently run as a series of vertex and fragment shader passes applied to GPU-drawn polygons. The game screen, overlays and underlays (including the phosphor overlays), and on-screen UI are all polygons drawn by the GPU. So even if we accept your definition of what GPUs are for, HLSL is still doing things "the right way".
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