It popped up first some time in the 90s (or at least that's when I first became aware of it), long before any "3D accelerators" or similar became available. Te

It popped up first some time in the 90s (or at least that's when I first became aware of it), long before any "3D accelerators" or similar became available. Telling a graphics card "here's a bitmap, please render it at these coordinates, over the framebuffer content" is so much easier and more efficient than, in the earlier days, rendering a cursor into the framebuffer (and then undoing that for the next frame), at the rate where this needs to happen (pretty much every frame) to boot. I don't know if in modern times, this could be reasonably achieved through compositing, but I suspect "here's the bitmap, render it here" is still easier, conceptually at least. > of an idea so clearly implemented in software. As an aside, many hardware things are ideas that could be clearly implemented in software.