Windows accelerator

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A Windows accelerator was a type of graphics processing unit for personal computers with additional acceleration features like 2D line-drawing, blitter, clipping, font caching, hardware cursor support, color expansion, linear addressing, and pattern, polygon and area fills.^[1] This functionality was marketed for accelerating the Microsoft Windows operating system. Windows accelerators have been superseded by multipurpose GPUs, which include acceleration for 3D graphics.^[2]

Most "Windows accelerator" video cards were 2D-capable fixed-function processors that received 2D drawing commands and pixel data sent from the CPU, resulting in faster window drawing.^[3] The reduced burden on the CPU, combined with the smaller data stream needed for the required instructions, resulted in improved performance compared to "dumb" frame-buffer only based video cards.^[4]^[5]

In the high-end professional market, at prices in the thousands of dollars, there were also coprocessor based video chipsets like the Texas Instrument TMS34020 available, which allowed offloading of some of the processing from the CPU to the coprocessor's videocard.^[6]

To make use of these accelerator or coprocessor based video cards, driver software for the specific video chipset was necessary.^[7]

References

^ "Definition of Windows accelerator". PCMAG. Retrieved 2021-08-05.
^ "GPU Server - All You Should Know About". Blog @ VSYS.host. 2021-05-05. Retrieved 2021-08-05.
^ "Your computer's graphics card isn't just for gaming. Here's how to upgrade it". Popular Science. 2019-01-07. Retrieved 2021-08-05.
^ "PC Mag, Making a Choice in the area of Video technology". 12 January 1993.
^ Warren, Tom (2021-02-26). "Nvidia starts boosting frame rates by up to 10 percent on 30-series GPUs". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-08-05.
^ Inc, InfoWorld Media Group (1991-12-16). InfoWorld. InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)
^ III, Scott Fulton. "Arm processors: Everything you need to know now". ZDNet. Retrieved 2021-08-05.

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