Im currently developing a (very simple) real time 3d game, it has to render about 550 polygons each frame. With Hardware acceleration (p3 550, 16mb voodoo3) I get less than 30 milliseconds per cycle, or upwards of 30 frames a second. However i tried it on a non accelerated machine (p266, 32mb RAM) and it chugged away at about 0.7 frames per second, or 1300 milliseconds per cycle. What can i do about this?
There’s not too much you can do… 
OpenGL seems to be intended for hardware acceleration. Software implementations are
probably not very well optimized on one hand, on the other hand OpenGL uses techniques which are very inefficient for
pure software renderers (such as Z buffer)
what you can do is to make some kind of setup, where the user can turn off stuff
like texturing, lighting, fogging etc…
also, support different screen resolutions.
Ann
It might be your drivers… I have a Voodoo2 card which really speeded up when I used the correct drivers. The default drivers your application goes for are the microsoft sofware render ones in your windows system directory, called OpenGL32.dll and Glu32.dll. I found a replacement set specifically for my card, which I place in the same folder as my application. There is a HUGE speed difference.
I’m in the process of trying to find out how to set up an application to go for hardware drivers first, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
I just remembered where I got the drivers I’ve been using for my Voodoo2 card… They are MESA 3dfx–>Glide drivers I got off of the MESA site, which should also work for your Voodoo3 card. http://www.mesa3d.org/mesa/
I couldn’t locate them in the last few minutes, so send me your email address and I’ll mail the drivers to you.
Thor Z.
thor@srv.net
Here is a site where you can get both information and drivers…
http://www.pseudonymz.demon.co.uk/suppwin.html