A Windows accelerator was a type of

Graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, m ...

for

personal computers A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or techn ...

with additional acceleration features like 2D line-drawings,

blitter A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to ...

clipping Clipping may refer to: Words * Clipping (morphology), the formation of a new word by shortening it, e.g. "ad" from "advertisement" * Clipping (phonetics), shortening the articulation of a speech sound, usually a vowel * Clipping (publications) ...

, font caching, hardware cursor support, color expansion, linear addressing, and pattern, polygon and area fills. The functionality marketed for

accelerating In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction). The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by the ...

the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, W ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also ...

. These have been superseded by multipurpose

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mo ...

s which include acceleration for

3D graphics 3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...

. Most of the Windows accelerator video cards were 2D capable fixed function accelerators that got 2D drawing commands and pixel data sent from the

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

and the fixed function run the given command which resulted in a faster drawing of the window. The lessened burden on the CPU, combined with the smaller

data stream In connection-oriented communication, a data stream is the transmission of a sequence of digitally encoded coherent signals to convey information. Typically, the transmitted symbols are grouped into a series of packets. Data streaming has be ...

needed for the required instructions, resulted in improved performance compared to dumb frame-buffer only based video-cards. In the high-end professional area a price of several thousands of dollars, there were also coprocessor based video chipsets like the Texas Instrument TMS34020 available that had their own processor which allowed to offload some of the processing data from the CPU to the coprocessor the videocard. To make use of these accelerator or coprocessor based video cards, a Windows Graphic driver for the specific video chipset was necessary.

References

Graphics processing units {{Windows-stub

See also

References