D3DDEVTYPE_HAL Question

[bri189a]

Okay Ive download the DX9 developers library... seems that for all the samples (and maybe the reason some of my games never worked right) the only way they display faster than <1fps is to use D3DDEVTYPE_HAL rather than D3DDEVTYPE_REF... many of the samples dont allow me to chose the HAL redering device so Im SOL on those... what basically are these two devices, why does it make such a big differance in the fps speed, and will this be a hinderance to my programming endevours? I have a ATI Radeon 7500 series with 4x AGP on the motherboard... thanks.

 

[mutant]

D3DDEVTYPE_HAL specifies that the hardware is used for rendering. D3DDEVTYPE_REF stands for reference rasterizer, it specifies that the hardware features will have to be emulated, that is why it runs so slow. Also REF is only available with the DX9 SDK, it is not redistributed with the retail runtimes, so the only two devices you could use in production are hardware and software.
In some samples you cant choose the hardware because you hardware might not be capable of doing whatever Direct3D needs it to do, so it has to emulated.

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

D3DDEVTYPE_HAL tells D3D to use the hardware capabilities of the video card.
D3DDEVTYPE_REF is a software (not for end user use) reference driver - IIRC it supports all the DirectX features but is not accelerated in any way at all.
As to wether you can select the HAL or not depends on the video card in use.