Well this question stems from a long argument that a friend often brings up about computing power and video card features. In short he simply refuses to acknowlage that video card hardware acceleration features have enough of an impact on game performance on newer and more currently released games.

On my laptop, which is getting rather old and it's video card which is a few generations below the current generation of video card, has a ATI Rage Mobility M1 (2x) AGP (with 8MB of physical video RAM, AGP expandable). Now I'd call that ancient as far as video processing goes. And I cannot count the amount of missing hardware features for 3D graphics processing from todays cards and games.

So, to further my interestin the topic. What are the major 3D acceleration hardware features of today's video cards?