A graphics accelerator may or may not be independant from the actual "daubing dots on the glass" graphics hardware. Accelerators first appeared (For mainstream PCs) on 2D only cards with 2D accelerated functions like drawing of 2D polygons, filling an area, bit blitting a cursor or sprite across the screen etc, operations which the CPU could issue a simple instruction or set of instructions to the card for instead of specifying each dot and color. 3D accelerators are much the same, but offer 3 dimensional shape processing, shading, fogging, and other highly math intensive functions, so that the CPU can issue simple instructions to get very complex effects. 3D accelerators are/have been sold as ad ons to standard 2D cards, such that they turn the instruction from the processor into the pixel positions, and then tell the 2D card what pixels to draw, so be careful of cheap seeming "3D accelerators", they may just be an add on accelerator that you still need to use a 2D card with.
In general, any 1mb SVGA card could be fairly described as "accelerated" due to a high likelyhood of at least having some 2D fill functions and a hardware sprite/cursor. The degree of acceleration depends much on the chipset. MPEG acceleration can be a misnomer, where the card actually just accelerates the sizing of the frame and does not help in any way with the decompression beyond unloading the CPU of the sizing task, however this can be very useful still and give a useful boost to many systems.
If you want to replace the Video card in your system look for a card that says something like "2D and 3D acceleratED" rather than just "3D acceleratOR" and you lessen your chances of ending up with an add on card.
For more information on the state of the art in 3D accelerated graphics hardware, see the reviews and articles at places like
www.tomshardware.com
www.extremegamers.com
regards,
Road Warrior
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by: d_hallPosted on 2000-09-02 at 20:52:19ID: 4169565
AFAIK, they are more or less marketing hype and can be used interchangeably.
I guess strictly a graphics card is and card (from the old CGA ones through the latest 3d Voodoo5), whereas a graphic accelarator is a chip.
Both are the connection between the brains of the computer and the monitor. Can vary from simple display cards with little power (which can deal with Windows & text), through to cards with specialised graphics chips and even CPUs of their own to handle high-end graphics applications (like CAD and games).
Some have TV out connections, which means you can hook up a TV or video to recieve the signal which would normally go to the monitor (can make training videos, demos, record animations etc).