In article <48E48C7B.8020007@hawaii.rr.com>, david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> writes:
Might be true of the DOS version. XFractint is using my much more modern graphics cards through the X video system, so I doubt that it's using any legacy compatibility codepath ...
True, but its still not using the card any smarter than treating it as a dumb frame buffer.
I bet Fractint spends much more of its time calculating numbers than it does accessing the video card, anyway.
True, but DOS fractint is *also* using the slow compatability path on the CPU.
I can't imagine how Fractint could possibly use many of the "newer" features (3D acceleration and game-oriented stuff). Perhaps it could offload processing code to a modern GPU?
There are lots of things fractint could do with the features of a modern video card. Some fractal computation can be GPU based making the computation scream orders of magnitude faster than what fractint can do now. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>