Hello, Can anybody help me finding some usefull links about programming the video card? And is it difficult to program a specific video card (eg. the matrox G450 card)? Thnx, *elmo*

you shouldn't program the video card directly. there are APIs for 3d graphic cards like OpenGL (a platform-independent graphics library)), glide (quite old) or Direct3D (the M$ API). additionally, you have to make some calls to your system's API or some windowing API to create a window to draw your stuff there with the 3d API you want (assuming you're not programming on old OSs like DOS where you don't have any of these APIs). programming the card directly is really no good idea because you lose the flexibility which you have with general APIs, so your programs will run on every newer graphics hardware if you use a 3d API, you haven't to learn the different instructions for different cards and programming is much easier, programs are much simpler. additionally, modern operating systems restrict the direct access to the hardware.

GA

[edited by - ga on January 7, 2003 9:57:44 AM]

I know there are API''s handling this kind of stuff, but I just want to program my own 3D engine...

Ya, and like he is saying there are 2 main 3D APIs... OpenGL and DirectX.

Anyone who makes a 3D Engines uses a 3D API... the days of programming to specific cards are, thankfully, long gone.

Ok, I get your point. But I don''t need all the stuff available in the openGL library. Only the things for accessing the video card and pixel plotting is what I need. All the other things I implement by myself... Is there a very minimum library available that I can use?

thnx,
*elmo*

quote: Original post by _elmo
Ok, I get your point. But I don''t need all the stuff available in the openGL library. Only the things for accessing the video card and pixel plotting is what I need. All the other things I implement by myself... Is there a very minimum library available that I can use?

thnx,
*elmo*

DirectX.

DirectDraw can be very minimum if you just want to "plot" some pixels directly on the screen. You will code much less with directx than accesing the video drivers by your own.

You do realize that if all you''re using the video card for is pixel plotting you''re going to be wasting like the last decade of advancements in consumer video accelerators?