Question

[Blackmoore]

I have been playing games for years now and I still do not know what Hardware Acceleration is or what it does? The box to use hardware acceleration shows up in almost every game just never really knew what it was for.

 

[jaksback]

In software mode, your CPU is doing all the hard work involved in rendering 3D scenes. Since this is a lot of work it can get pretty slow for complex scenes. Fortunately, nearly every home PC nowadays has a video card which supports hardware acceleration. In hardware mode, a lot of the complex tasks are done by specialized hardware on the video card, which frees up the CPU to do other things. This can result in a dramatic increase in speed.

 

[waynejkruse10]

yeah, on ut2k4 using software acceleration, everything looks bad and it runs slow but using direct 3d or open gl it looks and runs sooo much better.

 

[Blackmoore]

So wait, hardware acceleration is good huh? All this time I have been using software acceleration, not knowing the difference between the two. It the same for other things like sound too?