graphics accelerator

graphics accelerator

A display adapter that performs a specialized set of functions in hardware to render an image on screen. Today, all display adapters (graphics cards) provide basic rendering functions; however, most of them have graphics processing units (GPUs) that are actually programmable CPUs. They move an image through a parallel processing pipeline that performs a different graphics function simultaneously at each stage. For more details, see graphics pipeline and GPU.

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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.