RM supports hardware acceleration (it's built on top of IM). To use it you'll probably want to enumerate the devices.

--TheGoop

For hardware acceleration for RM, you can see sample code of FlyFS in DirectX6.0 or later, and Rockem in DirctX5.

I've just read that about 90% of all D3D commercial applications (including games) use Immediate Mode. Does anyone know if this is true and does anyone know of any examples of games using RM? I'm just going through learning IM (DrawPrimitives) and have noticed how much harder it is to do things like loading meshes (.x files) and textures, and animation, and was obviously thinking RM might be a better solution. Is there something wrong with RM or is it just used less because most developers have their own 3D engines? If the only drawback to RM is 10% speed loss, then I would probably choose it for the ease of programming.

Any advice will be appreciated,
Simon

Thanks for all the replies, since I'm looking to a career programming 3D I think I'll avoid RM. I'll also take a look at OpenGL as advised.