Re: [Mesa3d-users] hardware acceleration

[Stephen J B. <sj...@li...>]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, delia wrote:

> I've come up with a 3D game but it runs a little slow, is there anyway to
> use HW acceleration?
 
If you are using OpenGL/Mesa for your graphics then if you have
a supported graphics card and an appropriately installed OpenGL/Mesa
library then it's pretty much automatic.

There are some things that your code *might* be doing that would
mess that up though.  Some cards can only provide hardware
accelleration under some circumstances - eg Voodoo-1 and -2 cards
can only accellerate in full-screen mode, Voodoo-3 cards can
only accellerate in 16 bits per pixel mode, etc.  Some OpenGL
API operations might not be supported in some cards and
result in horrible slowdowns - for example if you use smoothed
lines on an nVidia GeForce card, you'll be lucky to draw one
frame per second...but if you don't, you might make 100 frames
per second.

But in general, if you write using the OpenGL API then as soon
as your program is run on a machine with hardware rendering,
it will be automatically accellerated by the hardware. You
don't have to do anything special in your program.

That's the joy of OpenGL.

----
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