Graphic hardware could not only boost your framerate, it can be abused to outsource hefty calculations from the CPU. Something which is really interesting, for instance doing FFT for sounds on graphic cards. This is just a stub as we didnt try out something yet, but following the research with interest.
On Nvidias Cuda: http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2007/02/22/a-quick-programmers-look-at-nvidias-cuda/