I was just looking through some of the screensavers on a P100 running win98. I came across the OpenGL screensavers(Those that come with the OS). Since it had been such a long time since i saw any, i decided to run them. I was expecting jerky slow 5-10fps results since it was a P100 with no 3d card. To my surprise all of them ran very smoothly at a resolution of 800X600 in 16-bit colour. I observed closely and realised that the screensavers were using lighting, smooth shading and materials. Some of them probably had 1000''s of polygons(Like the Windows flag,3D text). Obviously these screensavers were written by either SGI or Microsoft. But the thing is, how come they run so smoothly on an ancient system with no hardware acceleration(Take note that lighting and materials were also used). How can we programmers optimise our apps so that they run well even on "obsolete" hardware.

Most of the OpenGL screensavers that come with windows don''t use textures.

Perspective correct texturing (without hacks) takes a fair bit of processing.

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