Kevin Jones wrote:
Hi,
Has anybody in the FG community compiled a list of the OpenGL services
that FG requires and is anybody aware of a WinXP utility that
interrogates the graphics system and reports which services are
provided in hardware and which services are provided in software?
This is "hard" to do in any meaningful way becuase hardware/driver
developers can play so many different tricks. OpenGL is designed to
have a single unified set of features that you can depend on being there
always. However, specific hardware vendors can impliment as much or as
little of that in hardware as they want to. Furthermore, depending on
the application, this may or may not make a difference. If you need to
draw some small item based on some opengl feature and the support for
that feature is done in software, you may not see any perceptable
performance hit if you only draw one of them. But your performance
might go in the dumpster if you try to draw 1000 of them.
So the real answer is to write up some sort of utility with knowledge of
the final application that can excercise your card/driver with the
proper proportion of items in order to determine if everything is "fast
enough."
But one person might need a solid 60hz. Someone else might need a solid
100 hz. Someone else might be happy with 15-20 hz.
It's just really hard to nail this stuff down in any meaningful way,
Direct3D has a function to query if something is done in hardware or
software, but even there it's not nearly as useful and meaningful as you
might hope (and you might hope that driver writers will never lie or
stretch the truth.)
In the end, you just need to code up something with knowledge of your
particular application that goes out and tests and times the features
card explicitely ... but to do that right, and to use that info to then
predict the actual performance of flightgear on the same hardware get's
really tricky really fast.
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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