Quote Originally Posted by WILL
At any rate, I would still like to have a list of the hardware enhanced 3D features in a modern video card. I mean what effects are hardware accelerated that can be listed?
Hmm...that's almost impossible to answer. Due to Shaders, you can nowadays "accelerate" any technique that does stuff on a per-fragment (or per-pixel, for all D3D-users) basis.
Some of those techniques are :
  • Bump Mapping
    With all it's different implementations (DOT3, Normal mapping, Parallax Mapping).
  • Per-Pixel Lighting
    With all lighting equations that one can imagine, since you can nowadays do your own calculations in the shader. Modern GPUs are even fast enough to do stuff like Dynamic Ambient Occlusion in realtime.
  • Post-Scene effects
    Maybe one of the biggest things that is possible with modern cards. This includes stuff like Bloom, Glow, Heat-Haze, real HDR (High-Dynamic-Range Lighting), weird camera-effects (like fish-eye), Video-Effects, etc..

And one of the very recent features of modern cards I totally forgot are floating-point textures, which allow you to store much more precision into a texture. Those are mainly used for advanced HDR-effects, though they can be also used for other stuff. For HDR see this demo (Requires a PixelShader 2.0 card or better).

Many other effects, like dense grass-layers or dense foiliage we're already possible on old hardware, but that hardware was just too slow to do that.