Bookup, MasterChess and others

[MikeLeahy]

I use Delphi 5 and FastGraph for various commercial chess programs.

[BlueCat]

Hi Mike

Can you tell me what advantages there are in using commercial libraries like FastGraph, over just using the Delphi components with OpenGL or DirectX. Is it something that was around before OpenGL/DirectX were popular? It's just that I've never considered using and I'm wondering what I'm missing out on :lol:

[Xorcist]

Well from my experience with FastGraph, which is not much so feel free to correct me Mike, FastGraph is mainly a software based API which has a fair amount of the code written in assembly. So it doesn't require specialized hardware to perform well, and does 2D seriously fast. Besides that it also handles 3D, and compared to DirectX in software rendering, FastGraph is much faster (so it's good when writting programs for older hardware or when you know 3D acceleration may not be present).

Here are some benchmarks (http://www.fastgraph.com/tutorial/bench.html). (note the page has the Direct3D software and hardware rendering columns mistakenly flipped).