I have an Nvidia GeForce 4800, just installed the latest batch of drivers from Nvidia. In the settings it looks like I do have the most recent OpenGL driver library installed and that my Hardware Acceleration is On for single display mode only (I don’t seem to be able to change this setting in any way). I’ve got one piece of software I’m demoing from someone else, and it warns me that it can’t run OpenGL in hardware mode, and proceeds to perform very poorly.
So I wonder - is OpenGL in fact enabled for my hardware, if not, why not, if so why can’t this program detect it, and is there a stand alone program which can test/benchmark my OpenGL performance?
If it says “Vendor Microsoft…” and “OpenGL Version: 1.1” you are stuck with the software emulation. This can have various reasons:
-If Matlab is installed, the Matlab Webserver will preload the software emulation layer.
-The Nvidia Installer could not install properly (antivirus tools block access to the registry).
-A previous display driver did not uninstall corectly (or not at all).
-…
If it says “Vendor: Nvidia …” and “OpenGL Version: 1.x.y” the driver is installed correctly but you are mostlikely requesting a pixelformat that forces the software emulation to kick in.
For example if you request a 16 bit zbuffer with 8 bit stencil you end up with a semi-accelerated software path.
So I ran it, and it shows me I’m running OpenGL version 1.5.3, Vendor Nvidia. So it looks like I’ve got the right OpenGL installed and running. Maybe I need to talk to the app maker?
The app maker suggested this utility also: glview. I ran it went through its tests. They all passed except the 2.0 core tests failed. Looking at the details, only 50% of the 8 2.0 core features are available, the 4 that are unsupported are:
Long version: a missing feature means the program can’t use it and perhaps whatever you are trying to run doesn’t need it else it would let you know.
So I wonder - is OpenGL in fact enabled for my hardware, if not, why not, if so why can’t this program detect it, and is there a stand alone program which can test/benchmark my OpenGL performance?
There was one called Tirtanium, but running a game like quake3 is enough. I’m sure there are plenty others.
The Geforce4 4800 cant support OpenGL V2.0 due to missing hardware features, in reality its not even a OpenGL 1.5 card (Nvidia chose to expose OpenGL 1.5 even on TNT2 class hardware which is nothing but a joke IMHO).
Sure the Geforce4 4800 has shaders but only 1.x shaders and not the 2.0 shaders that would be required for full ARP_vertex_program and ARP_fragment_program functionality.
Anyway I guess that the app is using some GL features that will force a software path in the Nvidia Geforce4 drivers, but without any knowledge about the app I cant tell you more.
Sorry to take so long to respond, I’ve been corresponding with the app maker, but haven’t heard back from him after this latest information. Thanks again all for your help, I will update when I learn more.
