I am wondering how much fast 3D graphics are. I have done a flat shaded rendering program and rendered a 1400 triangles object (with about half visible) at 40 fps on my 1GHz pentium 3. It would seem that my GFORCE3 would render it much faster then my 1GHz pentium. I assume that basically the GFORCE3 card have a prossecor unit much slower then 1GHz pentium. Does GFORCE3 being specific makes it able to render 3D faster then 1GHz pentium? What do you think?

Hardware renderers are faster for several reasons. First, and most importantly, a CPU has to do its math as a series of instructions (add, multiply, copy data in memory, etc.), while a hardware renderer can implement a lot of math operations on a single circuit (dot product, for example). Secondly, and also very important, hardware renderers do multiple calculations at once (parallelism), which means they can be faster by a factor of 3-4 on average. It also helps a lot that conditionals (if statements) are a lot faster in hardware than in software, because on a CPU a conditional can take hundreds of cycles to process, whereas in hardware an "if" is as simple as controlling which circuit gets the signal; in hardware, an "if" is basically free (not counting the cost of greater-than tests, or whatever).

There''s also the fact that hardware does not have to do anything but graphics. Your CPU has to run your OS, other programs, etc. at the same time as it is rendering. Finally, hardware renderers are very finely tuned to use the best and fastest algorithms possible. Chances are your software engine is not nearly as optimized as a hardware renderer.

A lot of other little things are different, but the biggest differences come from the reasons I''ve listed here.

Firstly, I think that you should use a spell checker of some sort (no offense).

Specialized rendering hardware always does the job very fast compared to software renderers. You say you have rendered a 1400 polygon flat shaded object at 40 FPS with your software renderer, but a GeForce could probably render a 100000 polygon object at 100 FPS, that is with bilinear filtered texturing of course.

There is the fact that your pentium 3 processor is not dedicated to graphics, it also has to run your operating system and various other processes. A hardware renderer does not have to run anything else than graphics, it can process many tasks in parallel, perform specialized math operations much faster than a CPU could... It also has very fast memory dedicated to it.

Thanks for the replies, it helped.