8

882 Chapter 22: Customizing the User Interface
Inter face
On the Display Driver Setup dia log, some options
are unavailable if the corresponding driver is not
installed in the system. The currently installed
driver is listed in the Display Driver group.
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
datanecessarytooptimizetheentire3Ddisplay
process.
Because OpenGL is m ost efficient when run on
systems with at least rasterization acceleration,
the software display dr iver/SZB option may work
best on systems with an ordinary 2D display card.
However, with a 3D-enabled card, you may see
dramat ic acceleration using the OpenGL driver.
The disadvantages of the Open GL dr iver are as
follows:
• All potentially visible scene data must be
transferred to the driver, and this can cause a
communication bottleneck across t he 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
variet y of display systems, there is no guar a ntee
that either incremental scene update methods
(partial window
blits (Block Image Transfers)
or dual planes) will work with a particular
implementation of OpenGL.
• Be cause lighting and texturing are restricted
to OpenGL-specified semantics, mismatches
between 3ds Max scene lig hting and textur i ng
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 (D 3D) driver
installed on your system. If you don’t have DirectX
8.1 or above installed, this option is unavailable.
To configure the Direct3D driver, click the
Advanced Direct3D button. This button, which
is available only when Direct3D is the active
option, opens the
Configure D irect3D dialog
(page 3–888)
.
To sw itch t o a d i f f e re nt d i spl ay d r i ve r w h e n
Direct3D is the active driver, click the Choose
Driver button on the Viewports tab of the
Preference Settings dialog to open the
Direct3D
Driver Setup dialog (page 3–887)
,clickRevert