Most people think of this as black and white, you're either accelerated or
not. But it's really a grey issue. Accumulation buffer operations, for
example, might be handled by the card's device driver, but typically in
software; calls to glBitmap or glDrawPixels with odd formats might require
extensive software processing before the data is fed to the hardware;
different rendering state could cause most of a frame to go "fast path" but
some small amount of geometry goes "slow path"; etc. Given circumstances
such as these, the functional spec for a simple "am I accelerated?" query
would be difficult to pin down.

It occurs to me that "hardware acceleration" doesn't mean much to the
typical end user; they just care whether the animation appears smooth (has
acceptably fast frame rates). If this is true, you might consider simply
timing your frames, and if you're obtaining, say, 30Hz or faster, then
assume that you're "hardware accelerated" enough, and otherwise display a
warning message that prompts the user to upgrade their hardware or device
driver.
   -Paul



> On 10/27/06, Gordon Tomlinson wrote:
> > Can't your just get the vendor string from the opengl Driver ?
> 
> This is just one high level test, it won't tell you whether 
> individual rendering pathways are accelerated.  For the later 
> OpenGL doesn't help you, which is real shame, it'd be great 
> if there was a mechanism for testing if current OpenGL calls 
> are acclerated or not.  Does anybody know of any extensions 
> for doing this?
> 
> Robert.
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