There always was demand for graphics acceleration, except that at first, it wasn't economically feasible beyond character generation and there were no standards whatsoever for vendors or software developers to follow.
Huh?
Of course there were standards, at least to the extent that
anything in the PC was standardized. IBM defined MDA, CGA, EGA, and VGA. And they
all supported more than mere character generation!
Then we got the normalization of 2D acceleration that ultimately became DirectDraw on Windows followed by 3D acceleration.
Again, you omit much. As part of the above standards, we got BIOS extensions for accessing them and performing simple operations. For drawing directly to the frame buffer, you could just write to the memory-mapped regions. And for the adventurous, you could directly manipulate the registers, as described in books like the classic:
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Then, as we entered the SVGA era and graphics cards started adding nonstandard 2D acceleration features.
VESA stepped in to try and organize the chaos with
VESA VBE (Video BIOS Extensions), so that not every DOS program had to include custom support for every graphics chip on the market.
Of course, Windows had its own driver layer, and Windows apps used the GDI API. Windows NT actually shipped with native OpenGL support, since Microsoft was trying to position it as a proper workstation OS. Then, as part of Windows 95 Microsoft introduced DirectX (including DirectDraw). Direct 3D wasn't ready in time, so it actually launched in 1996. I forget if DirectShow was included from day 1 or not.
3D acceleration was going to happen regardless of Nvidia and 3dfx. They only get credit for pushing it harder earlier in a bid for early adopter cash.
3dfx wasn't even that early. There were already about a half dozen 3D accelerators on the market, when they finally launched. The big deal about 3dfx is that they blew everyone's doors off. John Carmack was quoted as saying something like "3dfx actually delivered the kind of performance everyone else had only been promising." But they were so late that Id Software already finished porting Quake to Rendition's Verite (fun fact: which was the first fully-programmable PC 3D card, as it contained an ARM core), by the time 3dfx launched the first Voodoo card. Of course, with performance like that, a port to 3dfx's GLiDE API was soon to follow...
Another cool fact: SGI actually had a multi-card 3D graphics solution for the PC in
1991,
well before any of the commodity 3D solutions hit the market! Not only that, it had a Geometry Engine and yet it took the commodity 3D cards 2-3 generations before they started doing hardware transform & lighting.
en.wikipedia.org