A neat idea would be to make opengl perform in a less hardware dependent mode, like direct x. My computer can run direct x 9 great, but it chokes on opengl, specificly the newer games. A year ago I could run Never Winter Nights, yesterday I installed it, and crashed ever time on rendering in the campain editor.
I’ve been having driver problems with my graphics card. Since I don’t know the manufacturer (it’s been about 3 years, I forgot who made my card) I’m having a heck of a time getting the drivers up. The latest nvidia driver set brought my v1.2 up to 90%, but the higher levels are still not operational.
Long story short, direct x seems to be robust in performance. As long as windows is stable, and the latest directx dll’s are downloaded and installed, direct x works.
With open gl, I’ve had problems with keeping my bargain video cards from freezing or glitching.
I don’t know what the solution to my problem is. But I’ve seen four computers in the last 6 months suffer from problems with old video cards gradually losing there ability to run open gl applications.
I haven’t had a chance to check out the open gl api. I finaly got fed up with microsofts maze of commands and lack of data management freedom. I like to rotate my points all by myself. But open gl doesn’t have the cross system stability.