Iphone

I'm doing a project in which i will be creating a 3D engine to create a small game. I will have lots of objects that will be shaded and possible texture mapped. I will not be using any API's, i will be programming all the matrix transformations and code to render and display the moving 3D scene.

My question is that i understand that without API's taking advantage of hardware acceleration, the game could be very sluggish due to the computational expense of everything that needs to be calculated to draw each frame. Will a smooth running game be feasable with no use of API's (i very much hope it will be!), and if so, will this be possible in Java, or will i have to use C or C++, or does it matter as long as i have optomised my code well?

Iphone

As you have noticed, most of us recommend you to not write a basic library, by the way already available around. This is time consumming and error pronning.

About OpenGL weakness, take in mind that all major GPU's providers (ATI, nvidia) and ISH which uses such GPU's make their cards compliant to both Directx and OpenGL.

Also I don't recommend you to GPU programming, because you lost portability to others GPU's than those you have programed to. Except if you are in researching top performance at any cost, which is a good reason to do that. Many researchers are using the GPU as a coprocessor for heavy math programmimg (mainly in matrix operations).

I like too very much gamedev stuff, in particular NeHe, which was better when independent from gamedev, but still good.