more q's on software rendering

August 11, 2006 12:33 PM

simple question... which has faster SOFTWARE rendering capabilities, allegro or sdl.... or if you know of something faster than the 2, do tell
posted by xteraco to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Oh come on, how hard is it to just write a program to blit a million polygons and time it on the two? Do you need me to do it for you?
posted by aubilenon at 1:14 PM on August 11, 2006

yep
posted by xteraco at 1:17 PM on August 11, 2006

oh, i forgot to mention

in allegro, make sure the vido mode that's used is

set_gfx_mode(GFX_DIRECTX_SOFT,blah,blah)

that way allegro runs in SW mode
posted by xteraco at 1:39 PM on August 11, 2006

Well, raw C could be significantly faster than either. But I dont' think that's what you're looking for.

SDL is a much, much better constructed library, and my gut instinct would be to say it is faster for most things as well.

Here's the kicker though... its DirectX or OpenGL that performs the software rendering, if you're talking about 3D. Nothing to do with the actual library. Neither implements the full OGL/DX interface itself, just passes on instructions. For the native 2D stuff that both support, I'd bet on SDL (but don't have the dev environment set up to prove it right now).
posted by devilsbrigade at 5:39 PM on August 11, 2006

i'm planning on developing 3d graphical software for "non-accelerated" machines, such as laptops in the 333mhz range, wich have only emulation support for opengl and minimal support for directx (directx 7)..... i've done tests with allegro that suggest its quite fast, and would be suitable for simple 3d graphics on such a target machine.... but i have no experiance with sdl, thus making testing rather difficult. The ideal test would be to render polygons on both, sdl and allegro, and count how many each could write to the screen within a certain amount of seconds..... or better yet, code a 3d cube to rotate, count the fps (in sdl) then code a cube using the exact same method in allegro, and collect the fps... and see what has the best framerates... but as i said, i'm not doing it myself because i am not famaliar with sdl, and if allegro is faster, i have no desire to waste my time learning it hehe

-xteraco
posted by xteraco at 11:10 PM on August 11, 2006