Hardware Acceleration on secondary adapter

I’ve searched the web, and it seems that there are many outdated resources (like from 2002) that all say that hardware accelerated OpenGL on a secondary adapter under Windows is “not possible”.

I’d like to know if this is still the case today. For example, I’m running Windows XP, I have TWO display adapters, and I want to create a hardware accelerated OpenGL surface on the secondary card.

If this is not the case, how would I go about doing this?

“it depends”

In fact at the WinXP level, it is indeed not possible. But if both cards are from the same vendor, clever drivers will allow to get acceleration on both cards (I had sucesses with nvidia, I heard that it can also work with ATI). There are even settings to allow to trade correctness/speed, useful with cards from different generations.