i'm also unsure if all those mainstream gfx cards and its drivers are going to support opengl.
All mainstream cards do support OpenGL - Even most non-mainstream (like Matrox cards) as well as high-end professional cards (like FireGL, Wildcat and Quadro). my tests showed that i had to update nearly every computer system before i could launch a bmax program at a reasonable frame rate.
Really? Exactly how old systems are we talking here? BlitzMax ran at an excellent framerate on both the TabletPC (WinXP Tablet Edition), my old desktop PC (GeForce III, Windows 2000) and my new desktop PC (Intel on-board graphics and Radeon X600XT, WinXP Pro) using nothing but whatever drivers shiped either with XP or the graphics cards in question. it's true that many mainstream gfx cards don't support even dx9c
That depends on how you define the word "support". It's true that few cards take advantage of the entire DX9c feature set, but I don't think there are any cards that flat out refuse to work on dx9c - which is surely the issue here. i was suprised that even a matrox g450 didn't support opengl
Except it does.