3D Acceleration?

[Lionel Pinkhard <lionelpi@mweb.co.za>]

Hi,

Okay, I know this is a silly question, but 'What IS 3D Acceleration exactly?'. What makes it tick? How does it work? How does the card interact with the CPU, and other hardware? What instructions does DirectX and OpenGL send to the CPU, 3D card, memory, or whatever? How does it really work? And where can I get low-level specifications on it?

Also, what areas of the memory does it use? Also a000h? Or what? How do I implement the accelerated features? What are the differences between various cards? Is there a standard? How do I write a program to work on all cards? At the moment I'm staying away from DirectX, I might start using OpenGL in the near future, but for now I want to know how it really works. How can I do this MYSELF? Like VGA, VESA, VBE2, etc. and all that stuff, we do that ourselves. What's the difference with 3D acceleration?

Kind regards,

Lionel Pinkhard

P.s. Some Assembly or low-level C/C++ (or even Pascal if you want) code would help a lot I think.
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