Suppose you were going to release a program (not a game, but one that was 3d graphics intensive) which needs to appeal to as large an audience as possible (not just gamers). This does not include people with Pentium 75''s, more like Pentium 133+. They may or may not have hardware acceleration. For your first release, would you go hardware only and add a software renderer later or have the software renderer ready first? What portion of the general population would you say has hardware acceleration (if it is even possible to guess at this)? -Liquid

Don''t all 3D API''s have software rendering also? OpenGL does!

Maybe it''s a good idea to let the user choose it''s display resolution. This way people with only software rendering can use 320x200, and accelerator people can use 1024x768 or higher!

Yes, most (not glide) API''s have software rendering modes however due to the general nature of the API''s it ends up being slooooow (the exception being SGI''s Window''s OpenGL implementation).

-Liquid

Maybe it''s a good idea to test some color depths.
I have no 3D card, so use software rendering. Some time ago I switched from 24bit to 16bit, losing a little detail, but it ran much much faster!

Most computers with a p300 or higher have hardware acceleration even if it wasn''t mentioned on the box. So anyone who bought a computer in the last year (or two? can''t remember) has acceleration. If your game comes out say a year from now nearly all people with p200s will have upgraded by then, I assume.

Maybe it''s a good idea to investigate the type of audience you''ll be facing. This way you can determine the average computer it needs to run on, before making this important descision.

(ps: I have a PentiumIII 450 - without 3D accelerator (as far as I know))

eh.. throw together a software pipeline for non-accelerated computers.. just the rasterizers and vector/matrix math stuff, wrap whatever API you''re using, derive a class from it and throw your software stuff in there. then check for hardware acceleration, and if there isn''t any, use the software class.


--
Float like a butterfly, bite like a crocodile.