The same discussion again and again...

The same discussion again and again...

Carbon dioxide aside, what if you don't have that highly capable GPU to begin with?

They you are screwed. End of story.

Seriously, this ship sailed long ago. One instructive example is "Android vs iOS". iOS was designed from the ground up to use OpenGL. Android was designed to support dumb devices. The end result: it took years to reach the state comparable to iOS (only Ice Cream Sanditch added GPU acceleration) and in general Android requires more power to do the same things.

> It doesn't make sense to have a highly capable GPU attached to your system and not use it to process graphics data.

It does. It's called "conserving power".

s/conserving power/wasting power/

Difference between CPU and GPU is striking here: it's not percents. It's times. For a lot of operations we are talking about 10x-20x savings. You can do 3-5 times more "work" and still save power.

> modern video devices don't have any 2D acceleration or real 2D APIs anymore

They don't. But software APIs do.

Not anymore. Intel dropped XAA, Nouveau never included it at all, Radeon drivers are still supporting it but slowly start to go in this direction too (XAA Render is not suppored on R/RV/RS[456]xx). You must support EXA, UXA, etc - and all this is kinda pointless because it does not match the underlying hardware anyway.

Why introduce additional energy-sucking complexity where it's not needed? Why not use 3D hardware as 3D hardware?

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