Sorry, but I don’t quite understand why these days running an animation in software mode is alot slower than those days when they did it in DOS (or even in Windows!)
I’ll tell you why it’s alot slower, Resolution and color depth. Ever tried writing a true-color DOS app. Takes bloody ages to write all them values. In the olden days of DOS, 640x480 was like maximum res too. These days people use resolutions of 1600x1200.
Also I’m not talking about animations. You dont really need that much of OpenGL to do animations. I’m primarily concerned with games, and games with frame rates under 30fps in my opinion is too slow! Trust me if you’re writing a full game for the PC, and part of the render fell back to software implementation, when you expected it to be done via the graphics hardware, you’d sure know about it, cos you’re frame rate would fall through the floor!
As far as software optimization goes, it’s all well and good in the right place, but to be frank, your shiny fast hand tuned code on a 1.5GHZ P4, just aint gonna cut ****, when it comes to rendering millions of light shaded, multi textured polygons, with anti-aliasing, and all the other stuff that consumers demand from games these days.
Then shouldn’t we (users of OpenGL) ask that the default OpenGL software renderer (Microsoft’s if I’m right) be maintained in the same way as our adored video card manufacturers maintain their drivers?
You can ask, but they wont take one bit of notice from you! Simple as that. Their response would be “Use Direct X instead”
The fact is, software fallback aint gonna cut it, no matter how many hardcore assembly optimizers you stick into optimizing the software fallback code. The reason for this, is becuase you dont have the available CPU time to use on graphics rendering. It would probably take up twice as much CPU time as the rest of the game engine, which just isn’t acceptable, or even available.
Nutty
[This message has been edited by Nutty (edited 05-17-2001).]