graphics accelerator

graphics accelerator

A display adapter that performs a specialized set of graphics functions to render an image on screen. Today, all display adapters provide basic rendering functions in hardware, but many have graphics processing units (GPUs) that are sophisticated computers. They move an image through a parallel processing pipeline that performs a different graphics function simultaneously at each stage. See graphics pipeline for more details.

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(graphics, hardware)

graphics accelerator - Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.