Are glTranslate/glRotate/glScale hardware accelerated?
No, there are no known GPUs that execute this. The driver computes the matrix on the CPU and uploads it to the GPU. All the other matrix operations are done on the CPU as well : glPushMatrix, glPopMatrix, glLoadIdentity, glFrustum, glOrtho. This is the reason why these functions are considered deprecated in GL 3.0. You should have your own math library, build your own matrix, upload your matrix to the shader. There are some libraries which you can use for this.