ARB_Multitexture is fine, but I want it to work on way old cards, too.
How old cards are you talking about?
I thought ARB_multitexture was supported since Voodoo2. I think we should forget those old cards, and focus on new ones.
I think that if a graphics card doesn’t support ARB_multitexture, It is worth of nothing, and should be left behind.
I have to seriously disagree with not supporting older cards simply because they are older. To the contrary, if you can support them with little extra effort, why not? You only increase your audience. Afraid that your program might be misrepresented on the older hardware? Then plainly put a disclaimer on it indicating that while it can run on older hardware, it is not recommended. Simple. Quake3 could run on a freaking NVIDIA Riva 128, and that didn’t detract at all from the TNT2 owners.
Yes yes I agree that it is good to support as many hardware as you can, but sometimes it may cost a great deal of time to make things work on every machine.
I think myself that it is good to use some extensions as the primary option, but if there is no support for it, I’ll make a cheap code to be used instead, but that is usually much slower than an extension.