How do you read the kind of processor, soundcard, graphic card etc etc a computer has? Can you do did with OpenGL or is directX better for sucg things? Thanx in advance

What you''re wanting to do has nothing to do with a graphics api such as opengl or directx. Try looking it up in your win32 api documentation that may have come with your programming application.

But this is a true related OpenGL problem: How can I know if the video mode I have selected is hardware accelerated? For example, Quake III displays this information in the console at startup.

That would be very useful for all that cards that render only at certain depths or have and strict stencil buffer depth.

That''s what i meant too. I want someone to select a videocard and with that i set my opengl program to very nice or lesser graphics. But how do you get those system specs?

Anyone

There has to be a way to find what videocard someone has. Otherwise how do the big game companies that? Can you do it with openGl or maybe directx or has it to be done another way?

It''s done another way (not in openGL or in DirectX)

I think you''re barking up the wrong tree, though. Knowing which card they have only does good if you have a database of all the cards that are out. (Which becomes obsolete shortly after you release your software.)

Just time how long the frames are taking, and decrease detail until you get to the framerate you want.

And does someone know that other way?

That''s not what OpenGL or D3D are targeted at. Think of your OpenGL card as a black box, a working OpenGL pipeline, that''s all. You don''t have to care about what chipset it is, ATI, Nvidia, whatever. It''s not important. What matters, is that you have a OpenGL 1.x certified interface.
Everything related to that interface (color buffer depth, z buffer depth, stencil, max. texture sizes, available extensions, etc...) are accessible through the glGet* functions.

You get the CPU using the CPUID instruction. Google or Intel''s or AMD''s site will have information (maybe source too) about using it.

For video card information you''ll have to go registry crawling. Search the registry for your video cards name (as Quake displays it, for example), then assure that it is in a standard path. Then write some code to get the name. I''d start looking under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP".

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