lol, everyone offering different explanations. Direcftdraw (or what it does), is now exposed through d3dx9, check out "surfaces", there are lots of questions on it in the dx forum.

Anyway, please don't bother trying to write your own software rasteriser!, If you want to learn 3d, then start looking up 3d maths, - if you have the directx sdk lookup (in the help docs), maths functions, make sure you understannd them, don't worry, you will still need to use them, so you're better off learning the real thing (how you are eventually going to use them), than trying to roll your own software rasteriser.

[Edited by - Stevieboy on September 10, 2005 5:52:57 PM]

Quote:Original post by Scet
GDI is way too slow for this

That's not quite true.. Besides, it does seem a bit silly to require hardware 3d acceleration for a software renderer ;)
We did a fair bit of testing for a 2d library, on both GDI, DirectDraw and D3D. Anyway, GDI was actually much faster than the others on quite a few machines. The truly frustrating thing is that every version turned out to be the fastest on some systems (often by a factor of two) and we weren't able to establish any reliable patterns after testing on more than 20 machines.

Even so compared to the actual rendering overhead I suspect that any of these will be more than fast enough. There's quite a difference between blitting a few sprites and filling texture mapped polygons after all..