S3 Trio64/V2 is non 3d right?

This is a 4MB non 3d Accelerated card? Please confirm.

I've just installed one in a dev machine, fired up my DirectX software renderer and the thing goes like a rocket!

I'm getting on average 450FPS for 800x600 windowed with 40 moving, alpha/light blending and rotating sprites on an 800x600 background image.

Can this be right? If I switch back to my 3D card, and remain in software render, I get about 200Fps!!

I believe it's unaccelerated. There is a S3 Trio64 3D, which I'm guessing is the 3D version of the same chipset.

seems ... unfeasible - those sort of speeds, well good on the wee old thing. I hated them. They used to be in lots of office PCs and never seemed to cut the mustard.

I did some more tests and it does appear that pure software render on 3d hardware is indeed slower than on 2d hardware. I suppose that does make sense after all.

wouldn't dxdiag.exe tell you if the card supports 3D harware acceleration?

Who said technology only goes forwards?

Yeah bascially a good 2D card is better than a modern 3D card at 2D sad to say.

Well not really because you're not comparing like with like. Using a software renderer on a graphics card that has been optimized for software rendering is like using 3d texture mapped quads (2 triangles) on a graphics card optimized for 3d acceleration - that's what you should be comparing.

It's a design consideration, if you're gonna go 2D all the way then be aware that 3D people will have a performance hit. So basically you need to support both renderers for max performance on high end machines (doh!)

what even if doing 2D games in BMax using the DirectX7 3D card features?

No, BMAX is 3D presented as 2D. I have tweaked the modules so that it's possible for BMAX to render on a non-3d card. When BMAX is in the "non-3d" state it actually renders faster to 2D cards than it does to 3D cards. So... I detect the capabilities of the card and if 3D is not supported I switch to software. The software renderer is still DX7 but it's 3D Emulation, it's quite slow but when implemented with DirtyRects it's actually very fast - certainly fast enough for most puzzle type games. Since it's using the DX7 API you get all the rotation, scaling, blending included :)

yeah that's what I thought, just checking. So how are you detecting the 3D capabilities? By running tests? I'm surprised it's so fast as when I had to manually code scaling, rotation, blending in BPlus, using DirectX 1, even though I used the fastest methods AND Dirty Rects, it really didn't compare with what BMax could do at all...

I'm just checking for CreateDevice failiures. I also do some other checks to see if I can create surfaces in Video Memory or have to use System Memory.

		res=d3d.CreateDevice(IID_IDirect3DTnLDevice,primarysurface,Varptr device)
		If res 
			res=d3d.CreateDevice(IID_IDirect3DHALDevice,primarysurface,Varptr device)
			Print "TnL Failed : Selecting HAL"
		EndIf
		
		If res 
			res=d3d.CreateDevice(IID_IDirect3DMMXDevice,primarysurface,Varptr device)
			Print "HAL Failed : Selecting MMX (software)"
		EndIf
		If res Throw "CreateDevice Failed result="+res

I could also check for an RGB device as well but I reckon most CPU's, even the old crap, have MMX.

Thanks.

Do they still bung in MMX? It's been around since P166.

Yes, obviously