ARB_Vertex_Program

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

What cards support ARB_Vertex_Program? In particular, do all GeForce and Radeon cards support it?

Thanks in advance for any help

2

http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/extsupport.php?extension=GL_ARB_vertex_program

But since you must check it in any case, why bother about it? the card can have old drivers… Just check for the extension, and if your program depends on it, just give an error message and quit if you cant find it.

3

As a side note, this list will show that ARB_vp is supported by GF/GF2/GF4MX but in fact it is only supported in software for these cards (though, it’s still pretty fast)

4

Thanks for the link - that is just what I needed.

I am adding some skeletal animation to my game, and I was going to apply the bone matrices within a vertex program - similar to the nvidia sample. But I wasn’t sure if my targeted cards would support it. I would like to run on any Geforce/Radeon. Since it sounds like the older Geforce/Radeon still support via software - I see no need for a seperate code path that doesn’t use a vertex program.

Coding the bone effects in native code should be no faster than using a vertex_program running in software, correct?

Thanks again

5

I’ve found that writing our own highly specialized software skinner, which writes data to AGP memory (VAR or VBO) and then let the card do the model->eye->projection is much faster than letting the driver emulate a vertex program.

However, if you’re not up for spending significant time on optimizing your skinning and vertex transfer, then it’s probably good enough to use emulation.

6

Originally posted by azcoder:

Coding the bone effects in native code should be no faster than using a vertex_program running in software, correct?

It should be equivalent. All software implementations I’ve seen of the ARB_vertex_program extension are very impressive.
And anyway, people willing to accelerate the rendering know that they have to buy a new graphics card, so I tend not to worry about the perfect performance on low-end graphics cards. Just very good performance is enough IMHO

As for the Radeon, I’m afraid you will not find software fallback on the Radeon7000 series (7200, 7500, etc).