Hardware Acceleration
Starting in the 1990s, hardware acceleration for normal consumer desktop computers has become the norm. Whereas graphics programmers had earlier relied on hand-coded assembly to make their programs run fast, most modern programs are written to interface with one of the existing graphics APIs, which drives a dedicated GPU.
The latest GPUs feature support for programmable pixel shaders which drastically improve the capabilities of programmers. The trend is towards full programmability of the graphics pipeline.
Read more about this topic: Rasterisation
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