> > This all seems very backwards.
> >
> > Why does a "3D" window frame need to have special hardware?  You create
> > a window and it sits there for minutes, hours, days.  A button?  How often
> > do you click a button?  Let the CPU do that, and give hardware assist to
> > video, which has to decode the input and change the display 60 times a
> > second.
> 
> Without acceleration, you can visibly see the drawing that occurs when
> something is painted in the first place.

Draw into a non-active buffer, then send the "switch the buffers at the next
vsync" command.

> Another reason for hardware-assist is to reduce CPU overhead for these
> things, making your whole system more responsive.

Yes.  Video requires hardware assist because there isn't enough CPU.

> The difference between 3D graphics and video is that the video image
> has to come from the host all of the time.  With 3D rendering, a lot
> of textures and stuff are loaded into graphics memory and reused a
> lot, with the major bus traffic there being rendering commands.

That sounds a lot like how they do video compression.  Send a frame,
then for the next frame just send the differences.  Mpeg2 HDTV
including audio fits in less than 20 Mbps.  (That's bits, not bytes.)
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