3D-accelerators
Author
Does anyone now any good tutorials on how to write your own gfx-engine using the 3d-accelerator? Without using DX or OpenGL or something like that!
1. It would be a very bad idea since you would have to write a different version of your application for each GPU.
2. To use the video card, you would need to directly access hardware and this isn''t possible under WinNT/2K/XP unless you''re developping a driver. To play your game, users would have to install your drivers.
3. I don''t know if nVidia/ATI give away their video card specs. Without them, you''re stuck.
Conclusion : Learn OpenGL or Direct3D.
2. To use the video card, you would need to directly access hardware and this isn''t possible under WinNT/2K/XP unless you''re developping a driver. To play your game, users would have to install your drivers.
3. I don''t know if nVidia/ATI give away their video card specs. Without them, you''re stuck.
Conclusion : Learn OpenGL or Direct3D.
Answer to 3: Nope, they don''t, it''s confidential information and covered by NDAs. Only chipset licensees get them.
Some of the chip makers have released docs for Linux developers, and some Linux source is available out there.
Though generally I too really don''t see the point in re-inventing the wheel for something as boring as the interface between an app and video chip.
Extremely unlikely to get you any significant performance increase even if you went to the chip directly - you throw away work done by the driver teams for each chip (i.e. they know much more about their own chips than you ever will) and throw away optimisations and data organisation higher up too.
You also turn the clock back to the DOS days when you had to ask the user what graphics chip they had etc.
Talking to the driver directly only bypasses the API, many APIs have modes which let you do that anyway (e.g. "PURE devices" in D3D).
If you want to gain experience with register level programming of graphics hardware I''d strongly suggest getting involved with the amateur GBA/PS2 programming scenes.
That hardware is much more fun and far more relevent if you want a job programming games or similar. You only need register/interrupt level PC hardware knowledge if you intend on career in driver writing.
--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com
Though generally I too really don''t see the point in re-inventing the wheel for something as boring as the interface between an app and video chip.
Extremely unlikely to get you any significant performance increase even if you went to the chip directly - you throw away work done by the driver teams for each chip (i.e. they know much more about their own chips than you ever will) and throw away optimisations and data organisation higher up too.
You also turn the clock back to the DOS days when you had to ask the user what graphics chip they had etc.
Talking to the driver directly only bypasses the API, many APIs have modes which let you do that anyway (e.g. "PURE devices" in D3D).
If you want to gain experience with register level programming of graphics hardware I''d strongly suggest getting involved with the amateur GBA/PS2 programming scenes.
That hardware is much more fun and far more relevent if you want a job programming games or similar. You only need register/interrupt level PC hardware knowledge if you intend on career in driver writing.
--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com
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