Till now the performance of 3 D cards
has been good. 3D graphics processing begins with
3D physical modeling and geometry transformations,
lighting, and clipping, which are floating-point intensive.
It ends with integer-intensive rendering, which is
done primarily by 3D graphics accelerator cards. Today's
graphics accelerators are now so fast that the CPU
cannot always provide data fast enough to keep up.
Overall 3D graphics performance is thus often limited
by the floating-point calculation speed of the CPU
at the beginning of the graphics pipeline.
