Is it possible to emulate hardware with OpenGL, like "Direct3D HAL" mode in Direct3D? If that´s true, can somebody tell me where I can find topics about hardware emulation in OpenGL on the web? Gandalf the White

I could be wrong but the point of OpenGl is to be purley hardware accelerated.

OpenGL has Hardware Emulation built in [on Win9x and NT platforms, at least.]
_Just try setting your graphics to 16 color and run a game that doesn''t auto-switch modes or complain that "your not using the correct bit-depth." [May I suggest GLtron.] This way your graphics card won''t be accelerating the game It will still run because OpenGL is rendering in software.

Not to mention be REALLY REALLY REALLY ugly.

Not as much fun as redering to someones computer across the united states with X-Windows, and no hardware accelleration at 4 bit color. UGLY AND slow.

I know that if you have a AGP card and using openGL32.dll you automatically get hardware acceleration. But I want to accelerate the grapics without a card, that is emulate the hardware. This is what Direct3D does in HAL-mode (I think). Beside, if you have a voodoo1 or 2 you don´t get the hardware acceleration with opengl32.dll. But I have heard that MESA grapic engine support older voodoo cards.

Gandalf the White


Edited by - Gandalf on 2/3/00 1:53:28 AM

Just a side-note: HAL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer - it is NOT emulating the hardware, it is using it. HEL is the Hardware Emulation Layer which provides a software implementation of features not present in HW (or that was the idea anyway - in my experience the HEL is somewhat incomplete)...

/Niels

I belive you. I must have miss-understood things. But when my brother use the Direct3D IM programs that comes with DirectX 6.0 he get HAL and he have a ordinary, quit old graphic card with no acceleration!

Gandalf the White

if it uses HAL then it has acceleration. either you are mistaken about it using HAL or about it not having acceleration. or both.

to use software mode in opengl, you can use 32bit color if your card doesnt support 32bit color. it''ll make decent screen shots and run at 0.5fps. that''s about what i got when i tried some of the bump-mapping modes in D3D that my card doesnt support. you can pop in an old s3 virge card too. you can have some deceleration.

to use software rendering with performance worth spitting on in either D3D or opengl, you should turn off some features such as filtering and other cpu hungry tasks that the hardware normally does with ease.

Yes, I can agree with that ("if it uses HAL then it has acceleration"). But in Direct3D it´s a diffrens between the primary display driver and the 3d card display driver. I don´t know for sure if Direct3D HAL device automatically use the 3d card (if you have one ordinary graphic card, not AGP, and one voodoo2) driver, but I don´t think it do. Becuse in the DirectX SDK exemple you can switch from one driver to another one (Im not taking about devices now).

Gandalf the White