Let’s say I have TNT2 and Detonator 3 drivers.
And Does all openGL functions are excuted by hardware, not by CPU. For example glRotate, glScale and so on. Are all functions which I’m able to find in msdn about OpenGL are aceelereated or some of them are executed by CPU?
It’s only on the high-end market you have full hardware acceleration. I’m then talking about graphic boards you can only dream about.
But in general, the newer the card, the more is executed on the hardware. The good old TNT series does only rasterization, more or less, in hardware. Transformation is done on the CPU.
GeForce familly, Radeon and a few more cards perhaps, does transformations in hardware.
But there are no way to query hardware capabilities in OpenGL. You just have to say something like: “I assume you have X and Y featured in hardware, otherwise you shouldn’t run this program.”
and what about this
glGetString(GL_RENDERER);
returns
RIVA TNT2/AGP/SSE
does this means taht nvidia made somthing that some operations in openGL are executed on SSE instructions ? or this is written just to show, that we detected PIII :]
That string simply means that the NVIDIA OpenGL implementation is using AGP memory and SSE optimizations on your computer. On mine, same driver, same card, that string says RIVA TNT2/AGP/3DNow! You are given an option somewhere (OpenGL Advanced Settings) to disable the cpu specific optimizations. Disable the optimization, and that string may change (I haven’t tried that myself).