Do Graphics Cards boost speed of other rendering when we don't invoke DirectX or OpenGL?

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I am curious about how Graphics Card works in general. Please enlighten me.

If we don't make a call to a graphics library such as DirectX or OpenGL, does Graphics Card render every other things on screen as well? Or all these calculation for rendering depend on the CPU and are rendered by the CPU?

For instance, if I am to create a simple program that will load an image and render it on a window frame, without using DirectX or OpenGL, does having a faster graphics card render this image faster in this case? Or will this solely depend on the CPU if we don't use DirectX or OpenGL?

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My current understanding is that if you write an app in WPF, you can gain some benefits of hardware acceleration (not sure to what degree). I think WPF is a layer on top of DirectX anyways. – Chris O
You might have better luck posting this question on gamedev.stackexchange.com – Chris O

1 Answers

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The simple answer is "yes", in a modern OS the graphics card does render most everything on the screen. This isn't quite a 'graphics card' question, but rather a OS question. The card has been able to do this since 3dfx days, but the OS did not use it for things like window compositing until recently.

For your example, the answer really depends on the API you use to render your window. One could imagine an API that is far removed from the OS and chose to always keep the image data in CPU memory. If every frame is displayed by blitting the visible portion from CPU to GPU, the GPU would likely not be the bottleneck (PCIE probably would be). But, other APIs (hopefully the one you use) could store the image data in the GPU memory and the visible portion could be displayed from GPU memory without traversing PCIE every frame. That said, the 'decoration' part of the window is likely drawn by a series of OpenGL or DX calls.

Hopefully that answers things well enough?