Hi,
I know this sounds like a weird question, but for a project i’m working on my supervisor wishes to see the preformance enhancement between using software rendering and hardware rendering. is there anyway to tell opengl to use software acceleration rather than hardware? or does anyone know of any free libraries that have the same functionality as opengl but renders using software?
Thanks 
–Tristan
OpenGL have no concept of software or hardware rendering, so naturally it doesn’t have any function to switch between the two.
If you’re on Windows, you could choose a pixel format your hardware doesn’t handle so you get MS’s generic implementation, gauarteed software rendering. But that implementation is old and have only the very basic features of “todays” graphics. If you want more advanced features, you can download Mesa . Very good software implementation, and it’s very up to date (OpenGL 1.4 and lots of modern extensions if I remember correct). I really recomend it (not for performance though 
).
If you have an nVidia card, you can grab the “nvemulate” tool from the NV developer website, which lets you force the use of the software rasterizer.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv30_emulation.html
Tommiti systems has nice tool called 3d analyze (www.hotbot.com), that hooks ogl.dll’s. Try experimenting & you’ll find how to turn software rendering on.
What if you use the troubleshooting slider in Display Properties\Advanced\ to “no acceleration”?
aha, thanks justme, simple, but effective… my cube, made up of 128 128*128 textures came crashing to a halt.
thanks everyone else too, i may look into those later for a better way to switch hardware acceleration off which is local to my program only.
–Tristan
Originally posted by torisutan:
or does anyone know of any free libraries that have the same functionality as opengl but renders using software?
Download,compile and link with Mesa. http://www.mesa3d.org