User Guide

204 APPENDIX A
Hardware Rendering will improve the performance and the appearance of Atmosphere environments.
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Even if you have a newer video card, the Active Renderer may still be set to Software. If this is the case, then the video
card in your system is not supported. A complete list of supported video cards is included later in this chapter.
Hardware Rendering versus Software Rendering
In software rendering mode, your computer’s CPU has to do all the work of rendering a 3-D scene for each frame. In
hardware rendering mode, the CPU hands much of the rendering computation off to a specialized graphics processor
on the system’s video card, often resulting in higher performance and quality.