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Support
| 3D Hardware Accelerators
What is a 3D hardware accelerator?
How do I know if I have one?
Where do I get a 3D accelerator from?
What is a 3D hardware accelerator?
 In a nutshell
a 3D hardware accelerator is a piece of hardware, which speeds up the
rendering of 3D and 2D images. Since most modern games are very 3D intensive
many need a 3D accelerator in order to give you the quality and speed
of graphics required to be playable. The actual form a 3D accelerator
comes in varies. The three typical ones are:
- Single 3D/2D add-in board
- An extra board specifically for 3D
- Single 3D/2D chip on the motherboard
Note that
the performance of 3D accelerators has increased tremendously over the
past few years. Old 3D accelerators may in fact be so slow and have too
little memory to be of any use. If this is the case you may need to buy
a new 3D accelerator.
How do I know if I have one?
Well this
is trickier to determine than it might first seem. If you have bought
a new multimedia PC in the last 24 months, then it will almost certainly
have some sort of 3D accelerator. If you have bought a 3D add-in card
like a 'GeForce' card - then this is a 3D accelerator and the game will
work fine with this. Failing all else you can always just try and run
the demo of the product you are interested in! There's certainly nothing
to lose this way.
Where do I get a 3D accelerator from?
There are
a variety of companies producing such cards, you may want to check out
the companies and products below:
Company |
Products |
Website |
3DFX |
Voodoo 3, 4, 5, 6 |
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Matrox |
G200,G400, Parhelia |
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nVidia |
Riva TNT, Riva Vanta, Riva TNT 2, GeForce series |
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S3 |
SavegePro Twister |
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SiS |
SiS305 and better |
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| Videologic |
PowerVR Kyro2 |
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Trident |
BladeXP, BladeT64, CyberBladeXP2 |
www.tridentmicro.com |
ATI |
Rage 128, Rage 128 Pro, Rage Fury MAXX, Radeon series |
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The above
list is for informational purposes only and is by no means exhaustive.
Known Issues
| All cards with less than 16 meg of on board
video memory |
Starscape requires a 3D hardware accelerator with 16 meg of on board
memory. Cards with less memory are unsupported however there is a
chance that some may work. We recommend you download
the demo and try it for yourself. You may be able to increase
performance by changing some of the game
options. In particular, texture quality and screen mode. |
| ATI Rage series |
Please note that setting your display properties to
'Convert 32bit textures to 16bit' (under
OpenGL settings) will override the texture quality setting in game.
The Ati Rage series have no problem running Starscape with 32 bit
textures, so it makes sense to leave this feature off, and the game
set to 'high' texture quality. |
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