term: software implementation on Windows

Sorry for my ignorance!!

How we can tell if it’s software or hardware implementaion when we draw something usng OpenGL
commands.

For example,
glColor3f(…), glBegin(), glVertex3f()…, glEnd();

-KB

Generaly you can not except for measuring the speed of the rendering.

Some special situations are:
You can detect if you are running on Microsoft generic implementation by using the GL_RENDERER and GL_VENDOR string. In current versions of the Windows, that implementation always runs in SW.

If specific OGL feature was standalone extension before it was incorporated into the OGL core, presence of extension string for that extension is likely to indicate that this feature is hw accelerated. If extension string is not present, corresponding core feature may be still hw accelerated.

I searched through the forums using a keyword “software implementation”.

One of the question from this forum:
How does the OpenGL Runtime Engine know which Operations can be hardware accelerated?

Answer was:
It doesn’t know, it assumes. A driver written for a specific video card will try to run in HW everything it can, possibly somewhat more or less.

So, my conclusion is, we DO NOT know. But graphics card will do it’s best to run in HW mode.

One more question: I checked extensions using glString… and my card has lots of ARBs.
But I do not use those ARBs in my implementation.
Why have ARBs been mentioned so many times related to the software/hardware implementation?

-Kobe

Don’t understand your last question. What’s wrong with ARB extensions (and please don’t say ARBs, that is really missleading. ARB is the architectural review bord).