What exactly is hardware acceleration? It’s always in the games (although now standard). All I know is that software rendering is slower and looks worse, but I do not know what hardware acceleration is.
On another note, if I were to draw some geometry and wanted to redraw the exact same geometry in another window (I am using FLTK for my GUI toolkit, but that is beside the point) is there any way for me to quickly access that geometry or do I have to redraw it. As of now I am redrawing it each time, but it would be much easier not to. Just an idea, it may not be easy/possible. Any help is appreciated.
Don’t take this as gospel, but if I’m not mistaken hardware acceleration is when the graphics card proccesses the information to be displayed freeing up the cpu proccessor for other information proccessing. The card uses it’s DDR or whatever type ram it has, and also it’s on-board proccessor. This enables faster fps which produces a better quality images. Software acceleration would be where there is a specific piece of code ie DirectX (shudder the thought) to produce images, but drawing most of it’s abilities from the main cpu of the computer.
It’s little like the diffrence between using a axe vs. a chainsaw to cut down a tree.
With a axe all the work is on you to do the cutting, with a chainsaw the motor does all the cutting for you.
Same with a graphics card with 3D hardware, instead of the CPU having to do all the work, it sends the data needed to be drawn to the Graphics cards CPU, which has beed designed to process 3D data.
How the graphics card only handles the rendering of the scene, it is still up to the software to send it in a format ready to be rendered. The main CPU does things like object location, preprocessing of the data.
As for the other question, you have to redraw it each time. It is just the nature of how data is processed, any time a piece of data in the scene changes everything has to be reprocessed.
Originally posted by JonW:
[b]What exactly is hardware acceleration? It’s always in the games (although now standard). All I know is that software rendering is slower and looks worse, but I do not know what hardware acceleration is.
On another note, if I were to draw some geometry and wanted to redraw the exact same geometry in another window (I am using FLTK for my GUI toolkit, but that is beside the point) is there any way for me to quickly access that geometry or do I have to redraw it. As of now I am redrawing it each time, but it would be much easier not to. Just an idea, it may not be easy/possible. Any help is appreciated.[/b]
[This message has been edited by nexusone (edited 08-01-2003).]