Lesson plan
Windows accelerator
A Windows accelerator, or generically a GUI accelerator, was a type of graphics processing unit for personal computers with additional acceleration features like 2D line-drawing, blitter, clipping, font caching, hardware cursor support, color expansion, linear addressing, and pattern, polygon and area fills. This functionality was marketed for accelerating programs that used graphical user interfaces (GUIs), namely Microsoft Windows. Windows accelerators have been superseded by multipurpose GPUs, which include acceleration for 3D graphics. Most "Windows accelerator" video cards were 2D-capable fixed-function processors that received 2D drawing commands and pixel data sent from the CPU, resulting in faster window drawing. The reduced burden on the CPU, combined with the smaller data stream needed for the required instructions, resulted in improved performance compared to "dumb" frame-buffer only based video cards. In the high-end professional market, at prices in the thousands of dollars, there were also coprocessor based video chipsets like the Texas Instrument TMS34020 available, which allowed offloading of some of the processing from the CPU to the coprocessor's videocard. To make use of these accelerator or coprocessor based video cards, driver software for the specific video chipset was necessary.
Article summary
A Windows accelerator, or generically a GUI accelerator, was a type of graphics processing unit for personal computers with additional acceleration features like 2D line-drawing, blitter, clipping, font caching, hardware cursor support, color expansion, linear addressing, and pattern, polygon and area fills. This functionality was marketed for accelerating programs that used graphical user interfaces (GUIs), namely Microsoft Windows. Windows accelerators have been superseded by multipurpose GPUs, which include acceleration for 3D graphics. Most "Windows accelerator" video cards were 2D-capable fixed-function processors that received 2D drawing commands and pixel data sent from the CPU, resulting in faster window drawing. The reduced burden on the CPU, combined with the smaller data stream needed for the required instructions, resulted in improved performance compared to "dumb" frame-buffer only based video cards. In the high-end professional market, at prices in the thousands of dollars, there were also coprocessor based video chipsets like the Texas Instrument TMS34020 available, which allowed offloading of some of the processing from the CPU to the coprocessor's videocard. To make use of these accelerator or coprocessor based video cards, driver software for the specific video chipset was necessary.
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.