Checking for capabilities

I have a simply game where I'm drawing a flat terrain made up of tiles, each tile being made up of two triangles, and I'm using index + vertex buffers. On my computer (Geforce 6600GT, AMD Barthon 2600+) everything works fine. On my laptop (Centrino 1.7, Intel on-board graphics) nothing shows, so I guess the vertices aren't being drawn.

I'm assuming this is because the on-board card does not support some feature that the 6600GT supports. I checked the GraphicDevice.SoftwareVertexProcessing property, and on my computer it is false, while on the laptop it is true, so I'm assuming that's set right, since most on-board cards don't support much hardware stuff. I'm also using a BasicEffect so that might be it..

I guess I have to check some other capabilities, but I don't know which, so I just needs some tips on what should be checked and adjusted using the Capabilities class.

Thanks

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Checking for capabilities

Sunny Jung
A good place to start is running with the debug direct X runtime (http://blogs.msdn.com/rickhos/archive/2006/10/11/quick-advice-for-xna-gse-beta-testers-that-are-trying-to-get-native-debug-spew.aspx), and seeing if that give you any useful warnings.

Wild guess: are you using 32 bit index buffers I have a feeling the Intel might only support 16.

Have you tried other XNA games on the Intel card Does SpaceWar work, for instance
Milzit
The only issue with 16 bit index buffers is that you can't reference more than 65536 vertices in a single draw call.

As long as you have fewer vertices than that, you should generally prefer 16 bit format since it will be smaller and usually slightly faster.
sny

Yep, it was the 32-bit index buffers. 16 bit works fine :) Are there any implications to using 16 instead of 32 bit Maybe there is a way to check for it and use either 16 or 32 depending on the card

Thanks a lot!
Rykin Poe

Try filling your index buffer with an array of shorts instead of ints.
Checking for capabilities

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