There is always only one depth buffer, one stencil buffer, and one accumulation buffer.
There is no way to determine when you are using SW rendering, and I do not expect that there ever will be.
- Matt
I have made a grid of very tiny, very sensitive thermometers which I have pasted on my GPU (with arctic silver of course to aid conduction). I then made a neural net program to repeatedly use all of the opengl functions over and over one at a time and correlate them with the temperature fluctuations on the chip.
I don’t know if it’ll work for everyone, but I use this simple device to tell if any given function is hardware accelerated or not 
– Zeno
Just wanted to say thanks to Matt and everyone else who answered all my questions.
Best regards.
-Keith
Originally posted by Relic:
[b]Both wrong, the memory calculation goes like this:
xres * yres * (front_buffer_bytes_per_pixel + back_buffer_bpp + depth_buffer_bpp + stencil_buffer_bpp) here:
1280 * 1024 * (4 + 4 + 3 + 1) = 15 MB
In HighColor it’s:
1280 * 1024 * (2 + 2 + 2 + 0) = 7.5 MB[/b]
silly me throwing around with wrong buffers thx for correction