If you use a PC or a low-end 2D graphics workstation, you almost certainly have graphics hardware in your system, but it is likely to be of the GTXR-D variety. Primarily, PC and low-end workstation 2D graphics options are evaluated on the basis of screen and color resolution and read/write bandwidth to the frame buffer. When such systems do have hardware acceleration, it is likely for simple primitives like 2D lines and rectangles. The benchmarks cited for this class of hardware are typically 2D. The 2D transformation and rasterization stages are considerably simpler than the respective stages in 3D graphics. Typically in 2D graphics, calculations are done in window coordinates so the transformation stage is sometimes nothing more than a logical placeholder.
Graphics hardware designed for 3D is more sophisticated. In addition to color values, the frame buffers for 3D hardware tend to have ancillary buffers for per-pixel data like depth and stencil values. Rasterization and often transformation tasks are off-loaded from the host processor and into the graphics hardware. To support multiple programs concurrently sending 3D graphics commands to the graphics subsystem, hardware features are often provided to better integrate 3D graphics with the window system.
The next subsections consider the graphics pipeline working in reverse order from the display stage to the transformation stage.