One of the ways that you can categorize hardware acceleration is to saythat there is a continuum between two sorts of hardware acceleration:doing something instead of having the CPU do it, and doing somethingthat the CPU can't even come close to doing fast enough.

If you have a choice, you obviously want to be on the latter end of thescale. Ideally you'll have a fairly solid proof that the best softwareimplementation on a general CPU can't possibly be fast enough becauseit requires very

Graphics cards are the single most pervasive and successful sortof hardware accelerator in the computer world; they are a shiningexception to how hardware acceleration has generally been bad . Given my views, I'm interested in figuringout why graphics cards are such an exception.

Here's my current thinking on why graphics cards work, in point form(and in no particular order):

• avid users (ie, gamers) are CPU constrained during operation aswell as graphics constrained.
• avid users will pay significant amounts of money