Re: [pygame] Re: pygame performance

["Ryan Charpentier" <ryancharpen@xxxxxxxxx>]

My understanding of this is that if you pass the HWSURFACE flag to set_mode pygame will attempt to put your surfaces in your video cards memory. Updating the hardware surfaces to the screen is fast but trying to access individual pixel information is extremely slow. Whether or not you can get a hardware surface is dependent on your graphics card and the drivers. So its far from a sure thing. I think most people just end up using opengl because all modern cards support it and you can do some interesting things, like rotating in 3d dimensions and other advanced effects. I personally never used opengl because it looks complicated compared to pygame.

More info here: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/08/07/sdl_anim.html