How would I know that I am accessing video memory directly when I use JOGL? If a video card did not support OPENGL would the application simply not work or just work slower (because of the extra graphics layers involved in getting it to display)?
Are there method/s I could call which tests whether the graphics card is open gl compliant?
Txs
Sally
I’m not sure about other platforms as most of my OpenGL experience has been under Windows, but I’ll answer as best I can.
Windows will support software rendering if hardware acceleration doesn’t exist. This is also true with other OpenGL implementations such as MesaGL You can quickly determine what driver you’re getting by calling glGetString.
For example:
String vendor = gl.glGetString(GL.GL_VENDOR);
System.out.println("Vendor: " + vendor);
String renderer = gl.glGetString(GL.GL_RENDERER);
System.out.println("Renderer: " + renderer);
If you get a result that looks like this:
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
Renderer: GDI Generic
Then you know you’re not receiving hardware acceleration and have a software-only driver. Again, this is what Windows will report. I don’t remember what you’ll get with MesaGL under Linux.
I forgot about GLCapabilities. That class can report a lot of information about the card. Specifically, it can tell you if you’ve got double buffering and hardware acceleration in the mode you’re in.
Thank you very much for that. There is some useful info in those replies.
Rgds,
Sally