Realtime Renderer for Amapi 


This document contains important information about the Realtime  Renderer which could not be included in the user manual. Please review it carefully.

System Requirements

The Realtime  Renderer runs on a wide variety of hardware and operating systems. It's based on the OpenGL API. To make sure you are getting optimal performance on your system, please make sure Amapi uses suitable graphical options settings for your 3D graphic card. Please refer to the "3D Display options settings" section for more details.

The Realtime  Renderer requires a recent version of the graphic drivers of your video card installed on your computer. To get optimal performance, it is usually a good idea to update your driver to the latest version available from your video card's manufacturer.
 

For windows systems :

Windows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP
600 MHz AMD / INTEL Processor (or 100% compatible)
8 MB OpenGL 1.2 Compatible Graphics Card
64 MB RAM

For Macintosh systems:

MacOS 10.2.8
Power PC G3
16 MB OpenGL 1.2 Compatible Graphics Card
128 MB RAM

Graphic Drivers

The Realtime Renderer requires a recent version of the graphic drivers for your video card. (the graphic driver is the interface between your operating system and the graphic hardware). 

The  Realtime Renderer requires an OpenGL compatible 3D accelerator in order to run it. The following table lists 3D accelerators (3D Chipsets) supported and tested for the  Realtime Renderer (if your card is not listed here it does not mean it will not work, it simply means that we did not specifically tested it).
 
 

3D Graphic Card Web Site  Windows Driver Version MacOSX Driver Version
ATi Mobile www.ati.com Reference Driver Reference Driver
ATi Radeon www.ati.com 7.98 (CATALYST 4.2) Reference Driver
ATi Rage 128 www.ati.com   Reference Driver
ATi Rage Pro www.ati.com Reference Driver Reference Driver
Matrox Parhelia www.matrox.com 1.3.0.43  
nVidia GeForce www.nvidia.com 52.16 Reference Driver
TNT 1 / TNT 2 www.nvidia.com 52.16 Reference Driver

If your driver version is too old, try to download a newer one from the web site of your graphic card.  Usually you just need to go to the web site "support" or "driver download"
section.

 

Motherboard chipset drivers

On Windows machine only,  you may need to update your motherboard chipset driver in order to properly support AGP extensions.

The following table lists main chipset manufacturers and web sites where you can download the latest chipset driver according to your hardware.

Chipset manufacturer Web Site
AMD www.amd.com
INTEL www.intel.com
NVIDIA www.nvidia.com
SIS www.sis.com
VIA www.via.com

 

 

3D Display option settings:

There are few options that you can set (or unset) to get optimal performance for the 3D realtime rendering. Some of them rely on a powerful 3D graphic card.
If your 3D card doesn' t support some rendering optimizations,  then the realtime renderer will discard them for the rendering.

Let's have a look to these rendering optimizations options that you can tweak :

Fast Transparency: enables or disables fast transparency support for 3D Transparent objects. This option can speed-up the rendering.

Buffer Region: it is a mechanism that allows an area of OpenGL buffers (color buffer and depth buffer) to be saved and quickly restored without redrawing all polygons involved in the 3D scene. So, this option speed-up the rendering when you move an 3D object over the scene.This OpenGL mechanism is not available on Macintosh systems.

Dual side lighting : enables or disables the fast edges support for 3D objects. Draw polygons edges with optimized lines This option can speed-up the rendering.

Occlusion Culling: when this option is enabled, 3D objects hidden by other ones, can be removed from the rendering in a fast and efficient way. This feature is only available on newer 3D graphics cards. This option can speed-up the rendering.

Regular OpenGL mode: enables or disables regular commands for OpenGL. This option can slow down the rendering but should be safer for old 3D cards.

Antialiasing: enables or disables the antialiasing mechanism on 3D lines. This option can slow-down the rendering.

 

Remarks :

It's recommended on Macintosh systems with nVidia Geforce graphic card to disable the "Dual side lighting" option in order to get fast 3D rendering.

It's strongly advised not to change the display resolution while using Amapi. Doing this can cause display corruptions or program errors. 

It's not recommended to use several OpenGL applications at same time. Each 3D program reduces the available graphic resources for Amapi. 

In order to get the best 3D performance with Amapi, your OpenGL graphic driver should be set with following options (if they are available) : 

The Amapi development Team.

 

 

Copyright© 2006 e frontier Inc. and e frontier America, Inc. All rights reserved.

Amapi Pro is a trademark of e frontier Inc. and e frontier America, Inc. OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.