CompuServe Thread

John, Turbo DLD is in no way similar to Liquid Speed. Turbo DLD is an ADI driver with display list processing for AutoCAD. Liquid Speed is an accelerator for 3D Studio. I presume that you are using 3D Studio and therefore are using the Vibrant Inline driver that came with 3DS for your graphic card. If this is the case then using Turbo DLD would in fact slow you down and you would also lose some functionality as the ADI specification is not as complete as the inline driver that we did for Autodesk. If it is speed that you are looking for then you should take a look at Liquid Speed which should be available from your 3D Studio Dealer. Liquid Speed will improve the performance of the 3D Editor and Keyframer by 2x and1.5x repectively. If you want me to send you more info please let me know.

I did some extensive testing of LS last winter for Vibrant using a scientific procedure. The conclusion I reached is that the top performance you will get from LS is when you use it in combination with the Vibrant driver that comes with 3DS. The results of using the TurboDLD driver was that the screen redraws were considerably hampered, in some cases (hardware combinations) would actually slow down screen redraws. Without LS screen redraws, as I recall, were similar to the Vibrant driver without LS. If you have LS I would suggest sticking to Vibrant as there seems to be a synergistic effect of using them together. Using your video card with VESA also will not give the performance of the Vibrant driver. Also, I would recommend that you purchase LS if you are typically doing 3DS mesh projects where the mesh counts exceed 30000 – 50000 faces. This is where the pay back for your investment really shines. As your mesh count gets even larger the LS product purchase becomes even more of a cost saving. If you typically work with under 20,000 faces then the investment payback will be hard to justify.