GLUT vs Win32 and other issues

I’m a huge newbie to graphics programming so please bear with me. I’m attempting to learn openGL/GLUT however I was wondering if there is a huge performance gap between GLUT and Win32 specifically on older 3D cards. I’ve programmed a sample app that simply displays textured cubes and it seems unreasonably slow on my work computer that has a Matrox G400 (on other cards it seems to work ok). I’ve looked to other samples online (of people that look to be good OpenGL programmers) and checked performance of win32 vs GLUT for the same app and on the G400 I do seem to notice that win32 is faster (although the difference does not seem to be so bad as mine. These samples are:

http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorials/vc/lesson12.zip

and

http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorials/gameglut/lesson12.zip

Also, if anyone is interested my code can be located at http://www.bcyde.com/bomberdraw.zip . If you are willing to take a look at my code I would appreciate any constructive input and any insight.

Thanks in advance,

Hi !

GLUT is “a little” slower at a few things, but the rendering part should be almost identical, but there may be other things that make for the difference in speed, different rendering context settings and so on. I am not sure how GLUT setup it’s context, there may be different range for depth buffer or something like that.

If you request a 16, 24 or 32 bit depth buffer you may get different rendering speeds of some hardware and things like that.

Mikael

Thank you for your quick reply .