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DirectDraw:
Adapter Information
By: Jack Hoxley
Written: August 2000
Download:
DxInfo_src.Zip
(14kb)
You may have noticed that several
games give you the option of selecting to use the hardware/software renderer
AND giving the hardware renderer as the graphics card name; for example on my
system "Hardware rendering through 3D Blaster Savage4".
To get your application to do
this is extremely simple; and it also adds an extra, very neat feature for identifying
graphics cards. Just use this code:
Public Function GetAdapterInfo(ByRef
Name As String, ByRef GUID As String)
Dim Info As DirectDrawIdentifier
Set Info = DD.GetDeviceIdentifier(DDGDI_DEFAULT)
Name = Info.GetDescription
GUID = Info.GetDeviceIndentifier
End Function
'Then use the function like so:
Dim CardName as string, CardGUID as string
Call GetAdapterInfo(CardName, CardGUID) |
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You can now use the card name
as any normal string....
But what about the GUID bit?
well, this is more important than you may believe - the string returned will
be totally unique for the graphics card - all Voodoo 3 2000 PCI cards will have
the same GUID and all 3D Blaster Savage4 cards will have the same GUID - but
no two (different) cards will have the same GUID. You may well think that you can identify
a graphics card using it's name, in theory you could; but it's not guaranteed
to be 100% accurate - driver revisions may well change the name slightly (for
example).
You may well want to identify
the card using the GUID should you know through testing that your game doesn't
work ever on a certain card. If you identify the GUID for the problem card you
can alert users to this problem before they run the program...
There are other things that you
can get from the "DirectDrawIdentifier" type - but most of them are
useless really:
| Property |
What it means |
| GetDescription |
This is the
name of the card |
| GetDeviceID |
A number unique
to the chipset, this is not unique to the graphics card. Any graphics card
that has, for example, an nvidia Riva TNT 2 chipset will have the same value. |
| GetDeviceIdentifier |
This is the
GUID - we've already discussed this... |
| GetDriver |
This returns
the name of the driver, almost always the DLL filename... |
| GetDriverSubVersion |
Returns the
Low part of the version number, you should not use this to track specific
cards. |
| GetDriverVersion |
Returns the
high part of the version number, again, do not use for identification |
| GetRevision |
returns the
revision of the chipset - not the driver |
| GetSubSysID |
Returns a number
representing the graphics subsytem. Typically, this means the particular
board. |
| GetVendorID |
Returns a number
representing the manufacturer, such as "Guillemot" or "Creative
Labs" - it's only a number though... |
| GetWHQLLevel |
The Windows
Hardware Quality Level for the current hardware/driver setup |
You should now be able to identify
everything you'll ever need about the current video card...
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