No, they were not. Flight Simulator 1 was released for PC in the early 1980s (see 1), and even earlier for Apple II. Consumer graphics cards were not widely adopted until quite a bit later.
I'm sure this is just arguing about definitions, but the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA)[1] was a graphics card. I don't know what else you could call it.
I think the distinction you want is that CGA was a graphics card but later things that made graphics faster were graphics accelerators. These days a graphics output without at least some hardware acceleration is unthinkable.
Ok, that's fair. The CGA is technically a graphics card. I personally don't consider the true graphics card era to have started until VGA became a thing in the late 1980s.
IBM's MDA cards didn't support direct pixel addressing, which is one of the reasons I had a Hercules Graphics Card (original from 1982).
I spent way too much time trying to get various games to work with SIMCGA. Not only did it cause a massive slowdown (single-digit fps - or worse - was common) as it copied writes to VGA addresses into Hercules address space, the conversion from (e.g.) 320x200@16 onto a display that only supported 720x348@1 created usually required dropping/doubling lines at non-integer ratios, skewing the aspect ratio, and other nasty hacks[1].
I was very happy, years later, when I finally upgrade to a Trident TVGA9000B.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Flight_Si...