You should use HARDWARE_VERTEX when available, as it may be much faster on TnL cards, but you have to make sure the card supports TnL. Every card will support SOFTWARE_VP assuming it supports the DirectX version used, but the card may not have TnL capability

if you want to use hardware vp, you should check for its support first, as CpMan said. since the tutorials try to keep as little irrelevant code as possible, you won''t see enumeration in them unless they expliricly deal with that topic.

as far as card support goes, i believe gf and radeon were the first chips to support hardware vp, so for anything before that you''d need to use software vp.

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