Actual
rendering cannot be assisted by the graphics card. By definition, an accelerated graphics card is taking some instructions and doing the rendering itself to relieve some of the work from the CPU, while a rendering program is supposed to be figuring out how to produce a graphical image -- using instructions that you give it -- and then let you save the data. How does it get the finished graphic back from the card if it sends the data out to be rendered remotely?
Maybe they will add this in one day since graphics cards are getting so powerful, but I am not aware of any graphics card now that renders an image and returns the binary data for a program to use.
This does not mean that a good graphics card cannot help with a graphical design program, of course. Displaying the created graphics will still be faster. But for now there's no speedup in the actual rendering.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 30 June 2001).]