graphics accelerator

graphics accelerator

(graphics, hardware)

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.

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graphics accelerator

An early graphics card (display adapter) that performed a specialized set of functions in hardware to render an image on screen. Today, all graphics cards have basic rendering functions built in, and many contain graphics processing units (GPUs) that are programmable, special-purpose processors. They move an image through a pipeline that performs a different graphics function simultaneously at each stage. For more details, see graphics pipeline and GPU.

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