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Old 21st December 2005, 11:00 AM   #27
ajmacleod
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Scotland
Posts: 10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hawk
Here is what I was going by, is this...that is not a demanding requirement.
* preferable, but not necessary - 3D accelerated video card with OpenGL drivers
The video card I ordered (And am now replacing) did have 3d accelerated video and OpenGL 1.3 the problem was, according to the tech rep, is not suitable for this kind of program. Why? I haven't a clue.
Please don't pay too much attention to what "tech reps" say, in general they know nothing other than enough buzzwords to confuse the average punter.

Anyway, many gfx card manufacturers do not properly support OpenGL, even when they claim to. If you want good OpenGL performance, you can't go wrong with an nvidia card, and most of ATI's should probably be fine too. Always use the drivers provided by the _chipset_ manufacturer, NOT the card manufacturer, despite what the box will say; the drivers with the card will almost always be sub-standard in comparison to those from Nvidia or ATI.

I've had no problems running AC3D on any machine I've tried it on, including, amazingly enough, my Toughbook with a 266 Pentium-mmx processor and 64 megs of RAM. I've only ever run it under Linux though.

Being involved with the Flightgear (www.flightgear.org) project which relies heavily on decent OpenGL support, probably the biggest source of trouble we see is from shoddy graphics cards. The best OpenGL support from ordinary, affordable cards is from Nvidia; make sure you use the latest drivers available from their website, not just the ones that come with the card.

Hope this helps,

AJ
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