What is hardware acceleration?

In modern computing hardware acceleration is used universally. It became as familiar and natural as the expansion of MMX processor commands. But it was not always so. The first timid steps of developers and programmers to promote new opportunities, an ambiguous assessment of the computer community, and then - recognition ... it all happened. Now, hardware acceleration is present in almost every device and program. Sometimes, even there, where no one will look for him. Want a video card that supports hardware acceleration? You are welcome! A sound adapter? Yes, any number! Well, a network card? And it has the ability to unload the CPU from routine work with data packets!

Hardware acceleration is widely used in various programs for processing multimedia streams. Thanks to this, you can significantly reduce the time spent. Not everyone knows that the developers of browsers have long included in their products the ability to speed up the work with graphics (rendering complex pages) due to the use of hardware acceleration of the main functions through a video card.

What kind of acceleration is this? In fact, everything is simple. According to the general scheme of the computer device, all mathematical calculations are performed by the central processor (CPU). So, the team calculate the amount of "2 + 2" program is converted into machine codes and sent to it for processing. But since the processor performs a huge amount of calculations every second, with the addition of a new task its performance is slightly reduced - the kernel is loaded. Developers have long sought to increase the speed of calculations, without increasing the power of the CPU, and the introduction of auxiliary hardware capabilities has given such an opportunity.

Imagine a video card a decade ago. It was logic and video memory. Any information, one way or another associated with the image, was recorded with an array of memory cells and in a certain way converted into a signal "understandable" to the monitor circuits.

Any change in the image, even the banal movement of the point along the color background - the result of the CPU. He calculated the coordinates, the displacement and the cycle was repeated. If the point is not one, then the number of calculations increases. In addition, the processor already has "what to do" without it. The result is a slowdown.
To solve this, a specialized processor, which only dealt with graphics, was deployed on the video card, which allowed to free the resources of the universal CPU. A similar method was used to work with sound - audio chips "learned" to speed up some functions; Network - adapters have got a specialized processor, etc.

You can disable or enable hardware acceleration in the application, but only if this possibility is provided by the programmer. For example, you can control the graphics acceleration in Windows XP as follows: you need to call the desktop properties and follow the path "Options - Advanced - Diagnostics". The slider in this window allows you to completely or partially disable hardware acceleration in the entire system. Sometimes this is necessary to solve compatibility problems.