Hi All, I've been working with OpenGL for a while now, and I've recently come into a bit of a problem with it. My Development Computer is as follows: 1.4 Ghz AMD T-Bird 512 Mb PC133 SDRAM NVidia XFX FX5600 (256Mb DDR) And thats basically the useful information for the question I'll be asking. I also spend the weekends at my Girlfriend's parents house, and I've tried running OpenGL samples on their nearly brand new compaq laptop, but the samples are slow as could be. I've tried on other machines without accelerators and again, it's so slow it's not even funny. This is just running the executable file that comes with most samples. Now, I am assuming that this problem is caused by a lack of OpenGL support in low end, and mobility type graphics cards, is this true? And, is it a problem that as a developer I will need to worry about? Thanks all. [Edited by - tsulas on November 28, 2004 9:55:21 AM]

Change the title of your thread. It'll incite flames from people who don't read the post before replying :D.

As for your question, it sounds like the drivers of your cards are out of date. That could be a reason for the slow down. Another thing could be that the hardware doesn't support whatever feature that OpenGL program had, so it's emulating it in software, which as you know, is slow :).

The OpenGL samples could also be badly coded, e.g. using immediate mode (i.e. glBegin( );glVertex3f(10.0f, 10.0f, 10.0f); etc) instead of vertex arrays or VBOs.

Oh and what are the specs of the laptop you were running it on, do you test any D3D apps on it?

Sorry for the poor title, I meant to also add that I had tried the DirectX samples from the SDK and they run fine on the laptop which is around 2Ghz I believe with an ATI mobility 8600 or something of that sort.

How do I get the latest OpenGL drivers?

Also, sorry I didn't mean for it to sound like my FX5600 was running slowly, as t doesn't. It runs amazingly fast, and I have absolutely no problems with it... It's the only thing that allows me to continue to run newer games without a full system upgrade.

I got frustrated running the openGL samples, (They were small demo games from gametutorials.com) and so I decided to start learning DirectX instead... holy geeze what a mistake... what a hideous API...

Anyway, thanks all.

Well you don't have any OpenGL drivers, but you can just update your video card drivers, this may give better peformance.

What exactly from gametutorials.com were you running? Looking through the GL tutorials on gametutorials.com it appears that quite a few of them use immediate mode for rendering which could be causing a slowdown. The DX samples on the other hand will be using vertex buffers (note that this is a DX term not an GL one) which will render faster.