CompuServe Messages

Chris, sorry, but I don't believe that's quite true. Line draw and BLT engines only work if the program calls them. If the program just stuffs data into the video buffer, or (worse) calls the VGA INT 10 AH=13 calls to manually set pixels one at a time, no engine in the world will speed that up. 3DS does not, to the best of my knowledge, detect and call engines that may be on an SVGA chipset. As for my "assumption," I got it from hard data in several comparative reviews in magazines ranging from InfoWorld to Windows Magazine to PC Magazine and Byte and others, both Ziff-Davis and non-Ziff-Davis. These chips really do slow down programs which don't call their engines. And not just by a little bit. On your "hold your horses" paragraph, you answered your own question earlier when you said, "3DS does all of its rendering internally and sends the driver scanlines." Since 3DS doesn't send bitblocks, nor does it send display lists for drawing lines in bulk like AutoCAD, there is no way I can see that a driver can make use of the BLT or line-draw engines. The drivers, so far as I can tell, merely know how to call the correct graphics modes as requested, and put pixels on the screen as requested. Now, for AutoCAD, I know these drivers can give tremendous benefits, primarily because of display lists accessing line-draw engines. But 3DS just doesn't work that way. I wish it did.