I am currently working on a scientific application for visualy analyzing the morphology of trees.(one at a time thankfully Since the analysis has to be quite detailed, I''m concerned about the polygon count being too high. My estimation is that the program needs to handle around 6,500 poly''s. I''m not concerned about having texture maps or any fancy effects. Even a simple wireframe will do nicely if that''s the limit of practicality. My question is, is this goal within the realm of possiblity for a typical Pentium2 system using NT? Or will it just crash the system? I don''t mind if it''s a little slow. I would be very grateful for any advice.

You are going to need some sort of hardware acceleration, software OpenGL won''t cut it. If you have a decent graphics board, I would suggest any NVIDIA board from the TNT2 and up, things should run ok. If you have a T&L card and took advantage of the T&L extensions the card wouldn''t even bat an eyelash with 6,500 polygons. You are going to be CPU limited, but if you have a P2 300+ things should run "ok". Check out the GeForce2 MX boards, they are fast and cheap.

Nate Miller
http://nate.scuzzy.net

as long as youve got hardware acceleration it should be no problem, + if u mean by polygons (triangles)

4 comparison i do about 10000 multitextured + lit triangles at 20fps on a celeron433 with nvidia vanta

note also wireframe will prolly be slower than solid polygons

"T&L card and took advantage of the T&L extensions the card "

How can one enable/use/take advantage of T&L in OpenGL?

I had some idea that it was taken care of by the driver, but I really don''t know, but if it wasn''t abominably hard to include support for T&L, I would love to find out.

Thanks, Cel

Ok, I''m not quite seeing the practicallity of this question... Shouldn''t you have just tried to draw 6500 triangles in a loop before asking? I mean, you aren''t going to physically ruin your hardware if something goes wrong. I mean, you may have to reboot, but then you at least know what the limit is and you can change it....... Isn''t that the easiest way to test these things (especially for your own system requirements)?? If you ask in a forum full of OGL programmers, more than half of them are bound to be lucky bastards that have GeForces and Athlons, etc etc etc... (even though processors aren''t usually a factor when it comes to drawing since it''s handled by the vid card and vid ram...)

S.

Strylinis,

I''m sorry if I breached this board''s etiquete by asking a stupid question. To tell you the truth, what you suggested never even occured to me. If I had a formal education in programming or science then it probably would''ve. Unfortunately I do not, but I am still trying to do the best I can by studying the books everyday and applying what I learn. Since I don''t have any fellow programmers where I work to keep me in line and this is my first year on the job, sometimes I need to ask advice on the internet. Again, I apologize if i''ve caused an inconvenience. I''ll try exactly what you said as soon as I get into work tomorrow morning.

mitch

mitchbb-

Not bashing your decision to post a question here or your programming ability, and i''m definitely NOT saying this was a stupid question (i asked many along my programming way and still do from time to time)... Just saying that you should try these things out and see for yourself. It helps you get familiar with the coding techniques by trying many things on your own.

Sometimes, this will lead you to find something that nobody has ever thought of before, or if they did, maybe you''ve found a way to do it better. It just helps you grow a lot... Now, yes, there will be times that you will have a deadline to stick to (i know, been there, done that) and you are being kept up at night because you can''t figure this tiny little thing out and it''s pissing you off. Yes, those times are fine to ask. I''m not saying that this post wasted valuable space, or that it is not within the etiquette of the forum, or anything of the sort, just wanted you to start off on the right foot by trying things out and screwing around from time to time. You may just find the answer to the universe one day, who knows.

S.

Cel - NVIDIA boards have extensions that allow you to allocate memory that the driver can access fast which will give you better performance. The extensions are GL_NV_vertex_array_range and GL_NV_fence. You will need a GeForce level card to use them though. There are other things you can do to take advantage of T&L capable boards, check out NVIDIA''s developer site for more info.

Nate Miller
http://nate.scuzzy.net