CompuServe Messages

>> … what's all this talk about accel windows !!? (my Emily Latella impression) Greg, Actually, as I understand it (and those who _REALLY_ know what they're talking about, please jump right in) that the only thing that a driver will get you is effective and easy access to the available modes of the card. Thus programs such as the one developed by Vibrant which come with the Graphite, ATI cards and others allow you to set-up different resolutions and bit-depths for the editing display and the rendering display (in 3DS). Thus with cards like the Graphite and the ATI Ultra (+/Pro) you could set your editing screen to 1024×768 and set the RCPADI to 640x480x24bit…etc. Since 3DS is caculating each bit and sending this to the cards buffer, intellegent accelerating chips etc.. to nothing to increase the 3DS performance (or atleast not much). Any old "dumb" t4000 based system will perform just as fast in 3DS. But, since the information is being translated to the card across the bus, the bus throughput and thus VL-bus based cards are of interest for increasing FLC playbacks (but not for rendering speed). Since it doesn't really make a "hill of beans" difference to 3DS which processor your VGA is based, the difference then becomes the performance of the card on other frontiers, such as windows. Many (or most) of the users of 3DS also use Windows and ACAD programs for image editing, scanning, etc. Once you have a selection of cards, all equally capable of providing the same resolutions and bit depth, then the desciding factor is it's performance in other programs where specialized chips can make a difference. Ang