Certainly OpenGL and DirectX acceleration was a thing in Windows 9x, kind of missing the point.
Videocards of the era only did exclusive fullscreen - you could not for example use OpenGL to render your windowed application's UI, that was all software.
alt Hacker News
Videocards of the era only did exclusive fullscreen - you could not for example use OpenGL to render your windowed application's UI, that was all software.