software / hardware rendering?

Hello everyone,

First of all, D3D sucks :slight_smile:

Now I’ve got some problems with OGL… There is this game I am working on, in fact it’s nearly finished… You may want to take a look at it (http://www.startron.org). Unfortunately it’s Windows-only at the moment…
Well the problem is, I think I’m doing something wrong during the OGL initialisation. Sometimes when I start the game, everything works well and it’s fast and beautiful (50 fps), but sometimes (without making any changes to it) it starts in a very slow mode, about 1 fps, and also with video errors (alpha blending doesnt seem to work then). When that happens, the screen refresh is so slow you can clearly see the new frame being written over the old one. I believe this ‘slow mode’ may be caused by software rendering, but why does it only happen sometimes?

My card is an elsa erazor III with a tnt2, but the problem also occurs on other cards (even non-3dfx ones). I never have any problems with quake3.

The way I am initialising everything at startup is as follows:

  • switch to full screen
  • create window
  • show window
  • get dc
  • change pixel mode
  • create and make current gl rc

I have also tried to change the order of these things, without success.

I always get exactly the same pixel mode, without PFD_GENERIC_ACCELERATED and also without PFD_GENERIC_FORMAT set.

I have tried the newest official drivers for my card, as well as glsetup. I really hope someone can help me… Any ideas are appreciated.

greetings from Europe,
Markus

P.S.: I have seen some discussion about sound libraries in here… Personally I am using SDL, you can have it for free even in commercial products.

As you’ve noted, the problem is mostly likely that GL is running in software. I’m currently working on a game using the Q3A engine and we’ve had problems with GL not getting shut down properly after crashes. Which is to be expected since the game cannot shut down elegantly in such a situation. So, perhaps the answer is that you’re just not shutting down the GL context properly and it causes a similar effect?