Back when videocards were mainly for playing games, Jensen specifically was very explicit about his idea that games will not sell cards forever and they need to find a way to sell cards an mass for some other purpose (I still don’t think he was right, but oh well). They did and still are doing a lot of very important scientific work, applying their stuff for research, from chemistry to astronomy, very cool stuff. Unfortunately, science pays less than virgins gambling on math equations, so that became their main focus after some time.
But man, imagine the parallel world where we spend as much time and energy on science, as we do now on autocomplete that can fool idiots.