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Graphics Driver Setup D ialog 839
On the Display Driver Setup dialog , some options
are unavailable if the corresponding driver is not
installed in t he system. The currently installed
driver is listed in the Dis play Driver group.
Note: The first time you launch 3ds Max Direct3D
is selected be default.
Software Display Driver
Choose this if you’re using software rather than
hardware acceleration. This choice is always
available.
OpenGL
Choose this option if you’re using any form
of hardware acceleration. The software w ill
use whatever driver has been installed in your
operating system.
The OpenGL driver supports geometry
acceleration as well as r asterization acceleration.
It offers the optimum display performance
for animated deforming meshes. It’s tig htly
integrated into Windows NT and Windows 2000,
and many 3D display cards were specifically
designed to accelerate OpenGL operations.
OpenGL implementations have all of the scene
datanecessarytooptimizetheentire3Ddisplay
process.
Because OpenGL is most efficient when run on
systems with at least rasterization acceleration,
the software display driver/SZB option may work
best on systems with an ordinar y 2D display card.
However, with a 3D-enabled card, you may see
dramatic acceleration using the OpenGL driver.
ThedisadvantagesoftheOpenGLdriverareas
follows:
•Allpotentiallyvisiblescenedatamustbe
transfer red to the driver, and this can cause a
communication bottleneck across the system
bus. In particular , this slows down the display
of individual primitives (as opp osed to str ips or
polylines, like wireframe displays).
• Because the OpenGL design supports a wide
variet y of display systems, there is no guarantee
that either incrementa l scene update methods
(partial window blits (Block Image Transfers)
or dual planes) w ill work with a particular
implementation of OpenGL.
• Be cause lighting and texturing are restricted
to OpenGL-specified semantics, mismatches
between 3ds Max scene lighting and texturing
and w hat appears in an OpenGL viewport can
occur. This applies especially to attenuated
lights and non-tiled texture display.)
Direct 3D
Choose this if you have a Direct3D (D3D) driver
installed on your system. If you don’t hav e DirectX
8.1 or above installed, this option is unavailable.
To configure the Direct3D driver, click the
Advanced Direct3D button. This button, which is
available only when Direct3D is the ac tive option,
opens the Configure Direct3D dialog (page 3–844).
To s w i tch t o a d i f fe r e nt d i s p l ay d r i ver w h e n
Direct3D is the active driver, click the Choose
Driver button on the V iewports tab of the
Preference Settings dialog to open the Direct3D
Driver Setup dialog (page 3–843),clickRevert
From Direct3D, and then choose the new driver
from the Graphics Driver Setup dialog.
The Microsoft Direct3D API supports both
rasterization a nd 3D scene-level ca l ls. It offers the
optimum display performance for large modeling
tasks, and pixel and vertex shading. (3ds Max
supports only D3D Version 8 or abo v e, which is
included in DirectX 8.1.) D3D calls are accelerated
if the display hardware supports this.
Manyinexpensive3Ddisplaycardscanusethis
driver efficiently. This driver supports scene
data culling efficiently, accelerates texture display