3D Graphics Then and Now: From the CPU to the GPU

Since the late 1990s, developers have been pushing graphics hardware to its limits, trying to create photorealistic environments in their games similar to those seen in recent blockbuster movies such as The IncrediblesTM. The need for graphics accelerators is becoming more apparent every day, as millions of calculations need to be done to render the complex scenes within games. There have been four generations of graphics accelerators, with the prospect of many more in the future. We found that the latest two generations of graphics accelerators speed performance are more dependant on the CPU speed of the system they are operating on than the previous two generations. Furthermore, newer versions of Direct3D offload more work to the Graphics Accelerator, leading to increased performance with Direct3D software on slower systems.