I made a program which draw a 3d functions. Ok. On my computer everything works properly - it works very fast when the graph is drawn by points, and it works a bit slower whent i’m using a texture. I wanted to test the program on differnet computer. There was Riva TNT in it. And what i saw?.. It worked ‘upside down’. A mean - the texture and filled polygons were drawn faster than dots and lines. Is it normal, or just the computer was wird? 
Hello.
What card is in your computer?
I wouldn’t be surprised if filled polygons are the fastest thing on a real 3D-accelerator.
On my GF2GTS wireframe mode is slower than solid mode, especialy if you disable COLOR_BUFFER_BIT (you can do that only in solid mode) 
Well I’ve got GeForce 2 MX 32 and everything seems to be workning poperly. Still - why Riva TNT fills polygons faster than it’s drawing points. I’d like my graphics card to be like that!
I’ve noticed that filled polys are faster than points or lines on a couple of cards (Savage 3d, TNT2). My guess is that polys are accellerated, and points and lines are SW. Just a guess, though. Maybe some hardware guys can shed some light on this topic? BTW, the TNT is not stupid; it’s just old. In its day, it was an amazing video card.
Actually the Riva TNT does’nt draw points and lines instead there are drawn by the CPU.
Thats why drawing filled and/or textured polys is faster on the TNT.
Well, i don’t say it’s bad but i was just a bit surprised. Those video cards are strange creatures. Thanks you all!
Im testing on a Riva TNT as well, and I also have problems. I have a simple program that draws two textured quads and fills up the screen, and then scrolls both with the camera and with texture coordinates.
It runs PERFECTLY smooth on my GeForce3 at home, but it’s jumpy on the TNT card (which is in a p3 machine).
I added some framerate independant movement using a windows QueryTimer, thinking it would help, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem.
I have the latest drivers for my geforce3, should I use those same drivers for the TNT?
Maybe it’s a driver issue?
But other games and demos seem to work fine…
Another thing is background processes, especially an internet connection.
Then it chugs about twice as bad.
What can I do to fix these things? any ideas?
Well, I don’t think if it’s possible to force your g3 to use Riva TNT drivers. What’s more it surely wouldn’t be good idea . I don’t think that’s any driver problem.
What about background processes - i don’t really know if there’s any way to make your program runs faster. You can just try to optimize it. Meaby you are using too much memory and so when other application are working performance is bad.
Isn’t the TNT something like 5 generations old by now?
I had one for a couple years, but come on, the minimum entry level card has been the GeForce 2MX for at least 2 years now!
What do you mean? People with a Riva TNT should be out of luck? I was trying to make a little 2D game out of 3d polys, but it isn’t working out so good on the TNT… well it just chugs, should I be doing some kind of culling? Im just filling the whole screen with a big textured quad as the background… is that not acceptable? There is never more than two screen sized polys being drawn at once, is this too much?
How big are your textures? To fill the whole screen you either have some monster textures (which probably kicks you back to SW) or you have alot of them.
What is your screen depth?
Are you getting kicked back to SW by something that can be done in hardware on the GF2?
What resolution is the screen? (If it’s too big then you’re bound to hit the Fill rate of the TNT)
All questions you should be asking yourself…
I should probably let you know I’m using SDL and I have windows98.
“How big are your textures?.”
I only have 3 textures right now, but they are 512 X 1024 BMP’s. I already tried scaling them down to 256X256 but it didn’t seem to help
I tried both 16 bit and 32 bit depths, not much difference
I’ve been using 800X600 or 640X480… haven’t tried below that yet… should I?
Other games can run at 800X600 I think
I think I might have found my answer: http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=0dafe92e7096d35fadf688e2d38ea022&threadid=385
I’m rendering a couple of large textured quads so I must be using too much fill rate memory.
I suppose that a big 3D quad is not a very good way to do a 2D background for a game… I’ll have to try some sort of 2d Blitting, maybe with 3d sprites over that. I want to have alpha blitted sprites and be able to use opengl commands to control them as opposed to SDL blit commands, but since its just the background I don’t need to alpha blend that so it doesn’t need to be 3D, right? Anyways thanks for the suggestions!