Some basic questions

Hi, i am currently a final year student in a university doing a project on OpenGL. I am pretty new to programming in this language so would like to clear some of my doubts. I currently have a program designed by my professor which is a Voxel Point-based rendering system(not exactly sure what that means). Currently, he is running this program on his pc which uses an integrated intel extreme graphics. My project is to use to use this program on another system with a more powerful graphics card to find out the effects of it in accelerating and parallelizing the rendering. However, what i understand is that since its coded in OpenGL, by simply bringing it over to another system with a more powerful gfx card, wouldnt it naturally be faster already? Do i need to add any additional coding for vendor specific hardware?

Hi !

OpenGL is not a language, it is an api, you use some programming language like C,basic,java or something else to create the actual application.

If you do have hardware support for OpenGL on the computer and drivers for it installed, then you will (maybe) get hardware acceleration for free, and that might make the application faster on the other platform.

But there are ways to improve performance by making changes to the software also depending on the hardware (SMP, memory and so on).

Mikael

ok… went thru some of the tutorials at nehe.gamedev.net. Got a little idea how its done… so lets say i wanna fully unleash the 16 pixel pipelines of say the nvidia gf6800 Ultra, i might have to add some nvidia specific code into my prog to optimise it? Any ideas where to get such info?

If you run your app on a PC with a Gf 6, it will most certainly be a damned lot faster than on an integrated intel chip.

To get more information about nVidia specific stuff, simply check out developer.nvidia.com .

To speed up some stuff you might want to take a look at things like
-vertex shaders
-pixel shaders
-occlusion queries
-vertex buffer objects
-point sprites
-texture compression

Also read some stuff, which comes with nVidias SDK. That´s usually quite enlighting.

Jan.