If you run D3D with HAL on a computer not equipped with a 3D graphics card, what happends? Incredible slowdown like in RGB or it don''t work at all? I programmed a little D3D app that rotate a polygonal plane and rendered it with a 256x256 texture, no other fancy things. With HAL on a PII 266Mhz with Geforce DDR it ran with about 500fps in 640x480x16 but with RGB 1-5fps. Woff! Anyways, the SDK really don''t say if HAL needs a 3D adapter, or does it? MS DX7 SDK: "If the computer on which your application is running is equipped with a display adapter that supports Direct3D, your application should use it for 3-D operations" ============================ Daniel Netz, Sentinel Design "I'm not stupid, I'm from Sweden" - Unknown

What it means is that the Direct-x environment tries to use
hardware if available but if it is not found it will settle for
software. But, that assumes that you have:
1. Enumerated the hardware in windows.
2. Programmed your code to behave in such a way.
So the best approach is always to allow for hardware if found
(by enumeration) and only as a last resort fall back on software mode. But having said that it seems quite odd for
you to get such horrible fps ratings in software mode. So, I
think that you might want to look over your code for optimizations. One final note, if you use enumeration (which you should) then you also have the opportunity to allow for
the player to choose which hardware to use (if there is more than one card installed) I am thinking of i.e. A matrox g400 installed and paired with a voodoo (whatever version) card.
Hope that helps.

My jolt-cola just got legs and ran away. I´d better stop these
late night sessions.

Yep, been there, done that. I''ve optimized the code, taken away all texture filtering and all, but I might have missed something anyway.

The thing is I''m gonna use D3D f/x in a 2D game, therefore I don''t want it to require a 3D card. But you''re saying HAL works fine without a 3D card if you just lay off the fancy HW f/x?

============================
Daniel Netz, Sentinel Design
"I'm not stupid, I'm from Sweden" - Unknown

Hello,

I''m not quite sure about this, so don''t like quote me on this or anything but when you run D3D with HAL on a computer that doesn''t have a 3D Graphics card, it runs faster than when you use RGB or RAMP.

I tried a program I wrote using HAL on my non-3D accelerated P200 and it ran decently. But when I used RGB it ran fairly slow in comparison, RAMP was a little faster than RGB but nowhere near as fast as HAL.

I''m using DirectX 5 so that could be the reason.

Hope I could help

RGB is pure software emulation which means you can go out and have a coffee break before it''s rendered the first frame, but it seems like HAL takes advantage of any HW function available.

Don''t anyone know this for sure?

============================
Daniel Netz, Sentinel Design
"I'm not stupid, I'm from Sweden" - Unknown

If you specifically ask for a HAL device, surely it would fail if no HAL is available?

The only exception I can think of is if the reference rasteriser is enabled, which is a software 3D engine that pretends to be a hardware device.

Otherwise, you end up with a HEL - Hardware Emulation Layer, which may well be very slow.

TheTwistedOne
http://www.angrycake.com