It has been recognized in the last 5 years that specialized graphics hardware can also be used for general purpose computations. The architecture of these cards is such that SIMD computations are naturally a good fit for a certain class of applications. I will outline the programming model of modern graphics cards, sketch the history of the development of the supporting software stack and if there is interest I will outline how we have implemented lattice gauge theory algorithms leading to dramatic speedup of Monte Carlo simulations.