Pixel Format and Stencil Buffer

I don''t realyl know if it causes a slowdown as such, but for cards without a hardware stencil buffer - i.e. The one I''ve got - voodoo3 it runs slower. I''m pretty sure most Nvidia cards have got a hardware stencil buffer, from about the TNT2. So I''m pretty sure that all newish cards have hardware stencil buffers and so having them enabled would not really cause any slowdown.

Dæmin
(Dominik Grabiec)
dominik.grabiec@student.adelaide.edu.au

All nVidia cards from the TNT1 have a hardware stencil buffer when running in 32bit colour. 16bit colour mode doesnt use a hardware stencil buffer on them.

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0wn 0wn 0wn your goat
gently down the pw33n

Yeah but am not talking about using the stencil buffer am talking about just putting values into the pixel format structure. I want to right a universal function that will put the right values in the pixel descripptor structure and then from there enable what ever buffer when needed...

I made a mirror yesterday with the stencil buffer and it runs damn slow. I have a voodoo3 and the frame rate drops from 100 to about 5 when you face the mirrored plane. I tried changing the pixels bits for each buffer but nothing changed. Even the size of the stencil plane doesn''t make a difference, if you''re looking at it.. its slow

Dæmin mentioned that he has a voodoo3 and it doesn''t have a hardware stencil buffer. That suggests that you are using software to emulate the stencil buffer, and that is probably why you get the performance hit .. just a guess.

-Brannon