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.
“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.”