   Existence of buffers
  Hello,I''m presently teaching myself OpenGL for cross platform game development in Java. I''m writing myself the obligatory 2d sprite engine and was wondering just how reliably I can assume the existence of the various buffers. I would like to experiment with a number of effects that would make use of the back, stencil, and accumulation buffers. Do they exist in all modern video cards (say TNT2 onwards) and OpenGL implementations for the major OS platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS)?Some advice would be greatly appreciated.Regards,VoidRoamer   ---What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. 
  don''t take this as read, as I''m not very knowledgable myself, but I think you can definitely count on a back buffer, probably count on a stencil buffer, and never count on an accumulation buffer. I seem to remember reading somewhere that accumulation buffers aren''t generally implemented in hardware. ;quote:Original post by baldurk  don''t take this as read, as I''m not very knowledgable myself, but I think you can definitely count on a back buffer, probably count on a stencil buffer, and never count on an accumulation buffer. I seem to remember reading somewhere that accumulation buffers aren''t generally implemented in hardware.   correct.VBO is more or less standard now, so if you target anything from the TNT2 and above you should prolly use it. -* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-;  Thank you ;quote:Original post by baldurk  I seem to remember reading somewhere that accumulation buffers aren''t generally implemented in hardware.   aye, it seems that currently the only cards which support a hardware accumulation buffer are the ATI 9500 and up;  didn''t voodoo 4 have some sort of T-buffer that could be used as a accumulation buffer? don''t really remember...cheers,alex 