Despite their ubiquity, consumer graphics cards are only around 25 years old. Before this, graphics were mostly run entirely on the CPU, which is extremely inefficient for graphics processing. The amount of compute that goes into rendering a frame can largely be done in parallel(consumer dual-core CPUs weren't a thing until 2005!), so hardware dedicated for the specific function of rasterization led to huge leaps for the consumer PC.
Despite their ubiquity, consumer graphics cards are only around 25 years old. Before this, graphics were mostly run entirely on the CPU, which is extremely inefficient for graphics processing. The amount of compute that goes into rendering a frame can largely be done in parallel(consumer dual-core CPUs weren't a thing until 2005!), so hardware dedicated for the specific function of rasterization led to huge leaps for the consumer PC.