Autodesk 12812-051462-9011 User Guide 3 - Page 2537

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 will use whatever driver has been installed in your operating system. The OpenGL driver supports geometry acceleration as well as rasterization acceleration. It offers the optimum display performance for animated deforming meshes. It's tightly 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 data necessary to optimize the entire 3D display 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 ordinary 2D display card. However, with a 3D-enabled card, you may see dramatic acceleration using the OpenGL driver. The disadvantages of the Open GL driver are as follows: ■ All potentially visible scene data must be transferred 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 opposed to strips or polylines, like wireframe displays). ■ Because the OpenGL design supports a wide variety of display systems, there is no guarantee that either incremental scene update methods (partial window blits (Block Image Transfers) or dual planes) will work with a particular implementation of OpenGL. ■ Because lighting and texturing are restricted to OpenGL-specified semantics, mismatches between 3ds Max scene lighting and texturing and what 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 have DirectX 8.1 or above installed, this option is unavailable. 7792 | Chapter 26 Customizing the User Interface