Re: [pygame] using opengl in pygame?

[Eric Burgess <eric@big-brain.org>]

OpenGL is dependent on a card that supports it.  The good news is that 
there haven't been any cards made in a long, long time that don't.  SDL 
isn't too dependent on hardware because it does so much in software.  
It'll run on those reeeeaaallly old cards that can't do OpenGL.  But 
it's a lot slower and less featureful.  I'd recommend strongly that you 
use OpenGL unless you know that you want to target platforms that don't 
support it.

As far as performance, I'd wager that if you're considering it as a 
plug-in replacement for SDL (only doing 2-d stuff with it), it's going 
to be either no performance (the platform can't do OpenGL), or it'll be 
so fast that you can consider your graphics operations to take zero 
time.  These cards are designed to render millions of polys per second.  
At one poly (or is it two?) per sprite, your card's gonna spend 99% of 
its time snoozing.  Your bottleneck will be Python, never your graphics 
card.

Documentation... there's not a lot of Python-specific stuff to it.  
OpenGL is an API, and as such, you use it the same from C, Python, or 
anything else. 
Ease of use...I never spent much time mastering SDL's surface routines, 
because I found out pretty early about pyopengl and never looked back.  
I can tell you it's not hard using OpenGL, and oh boy is it ever worth it.

Good luck,
-Eric

israel@uandmedance.com wrote:

> 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~