a neat idea

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.

The “problem” is that OpenGL implementations are 100% vendor-written. There are sample implementations avaliable, yes, but the vendor must implement OpenGL. And writing a functioning GL implementation is quite difficult, especially one that is optimized for your hardware.

Now, if you have a Radeon or an nVidia card, you should have no problem with GL support for applications. Most of these cards can run published games just fine. This is due to the fact that ATi and nVidia put effort into their drivers, and testing these cards with various games.

If you have some other, bargin card (Sis, Intel, etc), your ability to run GL apps is somewhat in question. These vendors don’t put nearly as much effort into their GL implementation as ATi or nVidia, and it shows.

Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about this, except to avoid these cards. nVidia has plenty of low-end cards (GeForce 4’s, etc) that have very good GL implementations.