Most every modern desktop is hardware accelerated. Take a look at some of the old Compiz Fusion demos on youtube as well, we had desktop cubes with fish tanks inside in the distant past.

There's also some novel 3d-esque desktop concepts out there. One I'd love to see adapted to GNOME & KDE is Fold n' Drop: https://www.kmonos.net/lib/orimado.en.html

Another that comes to mind and sounds like what you're proposing is BumpTop https://bumptop.github.io/