[GD-Windows] DirectX Pure Device / HW Vertex Processing Stuff

[Vek <ve...@ho...>]

I guess this is the best place to ask this - since DX is windows specific...
and its not really about Algos or such.

I recently got ahold of Geforce3 hardware to test my vertex shaders / pixel
shaders in, on my Game Engine.
To my surprise though, simply flipping the engine into 'hardware vertex
processing mode' cut my framerate to about 50% of what it is in software
vertex processing mode.  This is when dumping raw vertices to the card to
transform and light and render via a vertex shader... using vertex index
buffer and vertex buffers... no pixel shaders involved.

It also drops to 5% of what it is in software vertexprocessing mode if I
additionally mess with those vertexes (Transforming them by my program
manually instead of by a vertex shader).   Are there AGP specifics I'm
missing out on?  Or some situations which I'm not aware of?  I'm setting the
device up almost exactly like the NV demos, etc... except those go at
several hundred frames a second in the same situations.

I would have thought that hardware vertex processing would be the same speed
or faster... not 5% as fast.  500 polygons are enough to bring it to a
crawl.

If I can't mangle this soon, I'll take the renderer code out and place it
into a nice 'clean room' to mess with it, and find out whats going on by
brute force ;) But I was hoping someone out there already ran into this.
-Nick Lawson
ve...@ho...
project: http://members.home.net/vektuz/gw2k

hooray.