🚀 go-pugleaf

The accelerated video boards usually have an on board graphics processor that is used to execute graphics primitives. The primitives vary depending on the board. 

Some of these cards provide for a hardware cursor. (* note that some other,
so-called non-accelerated boards do this as well, such as the Video-7 1024i *) 

Bitblitting operations, pattern fills, line-drawing, screen clearing,
text-clipping and more are supported by many of these accelerator cards.

Since I know that GEOS at least uses a cursor, and it probably makes use of
functions such as line drawing and bit blitting, it should be possible to
develop a version of GEOS that could use hardware video features. I don't know
if hardware support could be incorporated with the current video driver support.

Many of these boards (the TMS boards, the 8514 clones) were designed for CAD and
only later used to accelerate windows.

Some of these boards have been criticized (the S3 based products in particular)
because they actually slow down performance in standard VGA modes. This could
actually translate to slower GEOS performance. S3 products are probably the most
widely supported accelerator products aside from, perhaps, the 8514. 

If you are looking for a card that provides decent VGA performance and gives some
windows acceleration, a cost-effective solution is to purchase an accelerator
board based on the Western Digital (Paradise) accelerated chipset. (Ex: Diamond
Speedstar 24x) This chipset can be found in boards costing considerably less
than $200, and accelerates a few of Windows most important functions. (no line
drawing though..) This chipset also remains partially compatible with the older
Paradise SVGA chipsets, and supports 640x480x16.8 Million colors and
800x600x65536 colors in addition to the (almost standard) 1024x768x256 and
1280x1024x16. Note: in 24 bit mode, these cards are only really useful as
framebuffers. 
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* Dan Galpin                                            galpin@cats.ucsc.edu *
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