Comment by bombcar
18 hours ago
Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.
18 hours ago
Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.
Minor correction: Apple introduced GPU-accelerated GUI in 10.2 with the introduction of Quartz Extreme.
Display PostScript did not have GPU acceleration, as far as I know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor?#Quartz_Extr...
Windows 3.1, with the aproppiated drivers and modern SVGA card, had accelerated 2d graphics. Accelerated GUIs don't even need GPU or 3d.
What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.
The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.
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Most people consider GPU to mean "3D accelerator" though technically it refers to any coprocessor that can do work "for" the main system at the same time.
GPU-accelerated GUI usually refers to using the texture mapping capabilities of a 3D accelerator for "2D" GUI work.
Calling that "the GPU acceleration" on Mac OS X was a bit overstating the things. It supported rotations, compositing, and some other bulk operations, but text and precise 2D graphics was rendered on the CPU.
It _still_ is not trivial to render high-quality 2D graphics on the GPU.
I mean Apple had a GPU-accelerated GUI in 1990, but probably not what we think of "GPU accelerated" these days
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Macintosh_Display_Card_8-...