Acceleration automatic?

What do you mean by “initialised”? All I have to do to get accelerated 3D output is to simply create the proper window (full screen or not), and select the appropriate pixelformat. The results will be accelerated as long as I don’t have OpenGL do something that can not be accelerated given the current hardware and driver constraints.
What OS are you talking about? Because by default, Windows does use hardware acceleration (if it is available).

Everything I’ve written in GLUT is hardware accelerated.

Question, what is the performance difference from using a full screen window (GLUT) and a genuine full screen mode.

Mike

There is no such thing as genuine full-screen mode. Full screen mode is just a window that covers the entire screen: when a window does this Windows gives that application all the GDI resources and mesasaging which is why it is usually much faster.

The only difference might be this: most cards do all Windows GDI acceleration and 3D acceleration on the same card. If the card detects it has all the GDI resources and knows the fs-window is an openGL window it can ignore all GDI stuff and the driver runs faster: eg. when this happens with 3DFX cards it puts up the splash screen. You don’t get a splash screen unless the window is of type POPUP so other fullscreen windows are slower. Basiically HW acceleration peculiarities all comes down to the cards driver implementation.

Create a window in GLUT, then query the pixelformat (with GetPixelFormat() and DescribePixelFormat() i think). Then create a window with your own code with the EXACT same pixelformat, and the exact same size. None of then should be fullscreen. Would be surprised if you get different results.

And thanks everyone, keep on posting messages about GLUT.

I think that we may be arguing a useles argument here. I had assumed that the MacOS implementation of GLUT would be simmilar enough to windows implementations, so that we were talking about esentialy the same thing. However it would appear that not only is apples implementation of GLUT completely different, but also apples implementation of graphics accelerators is different.
On a mac you must tell the OS that you want to use a particular graphics card before anything nice, fast and fancy happens. Obviously in windows it is a different story.