A Windows accelerator, or generically a GUI accelerator, was a type of

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

for

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

s with additional acceleration features like 2D line-drawing,

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 a ...

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

accelerating In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Acceleration is one of several components of kinematics, the study of motion. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnit ...

programs that used

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

s (GUIs), namely

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. Windows accelerators have been superseded by multipurpose GPUs, which include acceleration for

3D graphics 3D computer 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 the purposes of perfor ...

. Most "Windows accelerator" video cards were 2D-capable fixed-function processors that received 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 primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

, resulting in faster window drawing. The reduced 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 signals to convey information. Typically, the transmitted symbols are grouped into a series of packets. Data streaming has become u ...

needed for the required instructions, resulted in improved performance compared to "dumb" frame-buffer only based video cards. 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. To make use of these accelerator or coprocessor based video cards, driver software for the specific video chipset was necessary.

References

Graphics processing units {{Windows-stub

See also

References