Graphics Driver Setup Dialog

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Customize menu > Preferences > Preference Settings dialog > Viewports tab > Display Drivers group > Choose Driver button

(With Direct3D active) Customize menu > Preferences > Preference Settings dialog > Viewports tab > Display Drivers group > Choose Driver button > Direct3D Driver Setup dialog > Revert From Direct3D button

You choose and configure graphic display drivers on the Viewports panel of the Preference Settings dialog. This topic explains driver options available on the Display Driver Setup dialog and analyzes trade-offs in performance.

Interface

On the Display Driver Setup dialog, 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.

Note: The first time you launch 3ds Max Direct3D is selected be default.

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 data necessary to optimize the entire 3D display process.

Because OpenGL is most efficient when run on systems with at least rasterization acceleration, the software display driver/SZB option may work best on systems with an ordinary 2D display card. However, with a 3D-enabled card, you may see dramatic acceleration using the OpenGL driver.

The disadvantages of the Open GL driver are as follows:

All potentially visible scene data must be transferred to the driver, and this can cause a communication bottleneck across the 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 variety of display systems, there is no guarantee that either incremental scene update methods (partial window blits (Block Image Transfers) or dual planes) will work with a particular implementation of OpenGL.
Because lighting and texturing are restricted to OpenGL-specified semantics, mismatches between 3ds Max scene lighting and texturing 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 (D3D) 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 Direct3D dialog.

To switch to a different display driver when 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, click Revert From Direct3D, and then choose the new driver from the Graphics Driver Setup dialog.

The Microsoft Direct3D API supports both rasterization and 3D scene-level calls. It offers the optimum display performance for large modeling tasks, and pixel and vertex shading. (3ds Max supports only D3D Version 8 or above, which is included in DirectX 8.1.) D3D calls are accelerated if the display hardware supports this.

Many inexpensive 3D display cards can use this driver efficiently. This driver supports scene data culling efficiently, accelerates texture display (depending on the specific display card), and performs perspective correction.

The driver works with high-color displays, which provide a good trade-off between display quality and memory overhead. Incremental display update works efficiently.

The disadvantages of the Direct3D driver are as follows:

The driver currently runs only under Windows 98, Windows Millennium, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. (There is no multi-processor Windows NT support.)
Dual-plane operations are slow (if available), and there can be some additional overhead in minimizing/maximizing viewports due to the way D3D allocates video memory.

You can download D3D drivers from this location: www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/.

Custom

Choose this if you have a custom driver installed on your system. Such custom drivers don't use the software display driver (Heidi), OpenGL, or Direct3D. If you don't have such a driver installed, this option is not available.