[pygame] using opengl in pygame?

["israel@uandmedance.com" <israel@uandmedance.com>]

Hello wonderful pygame people.

I have a number of questions here about pygame since I'm quite new to this cool project.

What are the main benefits to using either SDL or OpenGL?  In what circumstances would one be more advised to one over the other?  I keep hearing lots of good stuff about OpenGL and lot's of mediocre stuff about SDL.  It seems that OpenGL allows one to have a lot of nice flexibility and functionality in one's poly based sprites, but at what cost?  If OpenGL is so nice, why would one want to use SDL? Is there a hardware barrier?  I've heard that while OpenGL is great for a lot of things, It's performance really is dependent upon hardware capability. More so, apparently than SDL.

Is SDL kind of like and entry level grunt that'll handle most everything you need, but if you want to get fancy do you break out the OpenGL can of Whoopass?

I haven't seen (though I've probably overlooked) extensive documentation on using OpenGL in Python.  Should I look to the PyOpenGL folks for that documentation? 

I'll stop here for now and try to keep to this one subject.  Thank you for any information offered.



~Israel~