Around 2012, there was a startup called Famo.us who raised $30 million for a CSS-based 3D engine. Looks like they pivoted to some kind of brand CMS eventually:
Secret sauce was basically every element absolute positioned, with an event loop that was diffing a CSS transform tree each tick. Worked pretty well, but was basically a workaround for browser performance issues that ended up being fixed anyways. (Was hired by them to do their React component library long ago)
It’s an awfully big stretch to hype that up as some kind of direct GPU access, as in this quote from the TechCrunch article about the pivot:
“By bypassing the CSS and HTML renderers to talk directly to the graphics processing unit, Famo.us could supposedly make 3D physics and other visual wizardry common with native games run smoothly for apps in a mobile or web browser.”
Journalists always simplify things to the point they become meaningless.
But avoiding DOM layout and its performance issues was relatively innovative at the time. It wasn't unheard of, but no one had really turned it into a framework like they did.
You can't blame journalists when the CEO of the company was actively spouting this "interfaces directly with the GPU" bullshit to describe multiplying some matrices in JS.
This article is hilarious. Or depressing. Maybe both.
"During the company’s debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Startup Battlefield competition, rather than giving a traditional pitch, Famo.us CEO Steve Newcomb spent his whole six minutes asking people to imagine what could be done if apps were 3D instead of 2D and demoing a floating periodic table. [...] just days earlier, the team made its first pivot away from what it called BenchRank, a ranking system for people, into an HTML5 development platform."
"When TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha visited [their offices], [Famo.us's CEO] pointed to some desks that seemed adequate, but insisted they would be replaced soon because they weren’t the right kind of wood."
It is now 2019 and the front page of famous.co has a big video and a pre-order button. One begins to wonder if this is an actual company, or an excuse to get a lot of VC so its CEO and a few lucky employees can afford to have nice places to live in SF.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-source/
The company claimed to have a secret sauce for accelerating HTML5 graphics, which turned out to be the matrix3d() function for CSS transforms.