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There is a big difference between hardware and software rendering. Software rendering has you plotting each pixel individually and writing to the framebuffer. Hardware rendering uses specialized APIs and hardware to dramatically speed up drawing and transformation functions.

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No, they both involve software, writing to a framebuffer. (By software, I mean code - software/firmware/etc).

A crappy 'hardware' accelerated GPU can be slower than a 'software' framebuffer write.

My point was that saying "It's hardware accelerated" is meaningless marketing speak.

Indeed, Apple's Mac OS X QuartzGL framework (GPU accelerated drawing/rasterisation) is slower than the equivalent CPU-based Quartz framework in may cases.

You're being shafted by downvoters who don't really know what they're talking about.

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