if you are using opengl at all, then you have hardware acceleration. A hardware accelerated device is a requirement for using the opengl renderer. I think you are asking about pixel shaders, no? Your geforce4 should have two pixel shaders on board, you might want to look into some specific posts on writing shader code. As of now, you can either use Cg (which is going down the tube), or the gl version, its called 'slang or something like that…anyhoo good luck.