no

The nVidia TNT2 M64 does support GUI acceleration in Windows. Adding that Trident video card is totally unnecessary as it won't improve the system performance in any way and wastes a PCI slot.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-11-07, 01:24:

The nVidia TNT2 M64 does support GUI acceleration in Windows. Adding that Trident video card is totally unnecessary as it won't improve the system performance in any way and wastes a PCI slot.

Thanks! I knew there was a need for GUI accelerators with Voodoo cards but glad to know I can safely store the Trident away for some other project.
Cheers!

GUI accelerators help with windows tasks like drawing windows, dragging windows, fonts, bit blitting icons and so on. In a windows environment this speeds up heavy use such as when switching between multiple office apps and doing things in those.

3D accelerators until Vista had nothing to do with GUI tasks, but in their 2D cores had equivalents to the old standalone GUI accelerators.

Neither really help system performance in a general backend sense, especially not in DOS, but 2D acceleration helps presentation layers, 3D accelerations helps games that specifically use it.

There are no stupid questions though, apart maybe from asking "How do you use a PhysX card to make the bananas fly faster in Gorillas.BAS ?"

Pretty much every single PCI VGA card in existence accelerated 2D and could be called 'GUI Accelerator'. Im trying to come up with one that doesnt do some form of 2D acceleration and Im coming empty. Or course some were better (ATI/Matrox) than others (Trident being the worst one), but by the time 3D acceleration hit the scene in 1997-98 your 3D cards did it better/faster than old timey 2D cards.

Yeah I think the boat had set sail a couple of years before PCI even with most cards released since '92 on EISA, MCA and VLB having some form of 2D acceleration, though some would say some were barely accelerated. Not that ISA didn't get in on the act also, but I don't recall many "purely ISA" accelerated chipsets. 8514 was the card that kicked it off I think.

If you want to take better advantage of the accelerator portion on Win98SE you can change your titlebars to be solid colors, so that Windows can use your accelerator's "fill a rectangle" command rather than calculating and plotting a gradient, and making sure you're using the default mouse cursors and not the color/animated ones so that the "hardware cursor" feature can be used.