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There was some form of 2D GPU acceleration used in Windows XP that is no longer used in modern GPUs. I remember a PCI Trident video card that provided such acce
by Shorel 6y ago
There was some form of 2D GPU acceleration used in Windows XP that is no longer used in modern GPUs. I remember a PCI Trident video card that provided such acceleration for my Windows 98-era computer.
There's also a 3D fixed pipeline that was all that the first 3D GPUs could do and it is also removed from modern GPUs.
A game I still play to this day is called rFactor, and it runs much faster in DX9 mode than in DX8 or DX7 mode in my hardware. At the very least, it behaves that way in this week's test. This means my hardware doesn't have that old fixed pipeline.
Some people with old hardware can only run it with decent frame rate in DX7.
So the answer to your question is: yes, 2D has been accelerated since forever, but now we have general purpose 3D programmable video cards, and they are so good that now we only have general purpose 3D programmable video cards and the other forms of acceleration are obsolete.
Except for things like video codecs and DRM.
- makapuf 6y agoTry windows3.1 instead of windows xp: 2d acceleration cards started early 90 , see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics or trident pages by example.
- Shorel 6y agoI take your word for it. It's just that my Win3.1 computer was too slow for me to remember the acceleration.
- pjmlp 6y agoEven DirectX had predecessor, back in Windows 3.1 with the Win32s extensions, it was called WinG and offered hardware accelerated blitting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG
- Shorel 6y agoI remember playing something that ran with the Win32s extensions and was similar to Wolfenstein 3D, but it was 3D, and I don't think it had anything to do with 2D acceleration. Also remember the glorious Fury3 game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_8tSpXLuK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_8tSpXLuK8