Hey folks,

I just noticed some differences between those two graphic modes. Movement seems to be more smooth with Hardware Accellerated 3D, while in Software 3D the movement speed seems to depend on direction and the surface you are walking on(?). I roughly tested the walk between Harmondale entrace sign to the signpost (~10sec in Software, ~8sec in Hardware). 
And I climbed into the griffon pit in Erathia north of the stables, which felt much faster in Software 3D. Then went to the Obelisk and walking felt weird there again (slow to the left/north, very fast to the right/south).

Has anyone ever looked into this?

(tested on german GoG Version, patch 1.1)

The game is not really well compatible in software mode. The diagonal movement as well as NPCs moving in place is not supposed to happen. Walking in hardware mode may be faster but for any% it is not applicable since some of the glitches only work in software mode, like click buffer for example. And the problem is that to make it work as intended it will probably require emulating hardware from the 90s which I doubt anyone will do for the sake of running the game, although for console games it seems to be normal to buy the proper hardware in order to speedrun games.
The other way would be to introduce a patch that will fix all that, but there's no patch that just fixes compatibility issues so far.
Glitchless category was introduced really recently and it seems much more relevant to it since it's not dependent on what glitches will work in the game. For me it also seems that loading times can vary greatly between the modes which can have a huge impact on the times especially if the route is well optimized and there's no real regulation regarding that either.

Thanks for the reply!
I want to speedrun glitchless anyway, so not being able to do them would not be much of a problem. I would not say that hardware mod is downright faster. Maybe if I get the route down I will just do both modes and see how it really differs.

fyling with software mode is much faster then hardware mode, because of up and down movement.
overall is software mode faster i think. 
If you go north direction it is really slow and northeast i think.
but the other directions are fast as hell :D never timed it. but it looks like this.

and GL on the runs Xenoras :)