School computers & OpenGL

Yo yo yo…

'K…I’m writing a small game in OpenGL(wow!). It’s not terribly complicated, and the graphics aren’t TOO fancy(most complex model has about 240 polygons). Even with my lighting disabled, I can’t get this game to run at a reasonable(or playable) frame rate for my teacher to see. Are the computers that crappy, or is something wrong with my game? This game easily runs over 90fps on my system if I disable the display timing. I would appreciate any pointers(sans pun) on this issue. Thanks in advance.

                               -Me

What graphics card is installed in those computers?
It is possible that the school computers are using a integrated graphics card which are usually slow. Also it is possible that you are using some feature that is not supported on that HW so it is emulated by the driver.

In case of software rendering, the most costly stuff is often texturing. Try GL_NEAREST sampling.
Then you can reduce resolution, 640*480 is doable.

Can you provide more details on theses slow computers ? OS, video card, cpu, ram …

I don’t know much about the computers. They don’t have graphics cards, they run on Windows 2000, and are pretty fast. Probably >2.0GHz. Thanks for the texturing tip!

I’m a software geek, not a hardware geek. :slight_smile:

You can use the the GLinfo tool to get information about OpenGL capabilities of those computers.

Try updating the graphics drivers from the graphics card designer’s site, if there’s no graphics card then yo want the chipset maker’s drivers so get them from NVIDIA ATI INTEL 3DLABS etc.

That will usually get you hardware acceleration.

Thanks again for the tips! I appreciate the help.

Its a good way for you to get used to coding for different computers, working on yours at home and the clients are 2 very different things, something you’ll have to get used to!