What does 3d accelerated mean?

[Maconthemove]

Got a software bundle from a 6500. Three of the titles say "3D Accelerated for the 6500". They are Mechwarrior2,Weekend Warriorand Virtual Pool. Is there a special card inside?

 

[Dan 7.1]

lol no, that means that the software is able to take advantage of the hardware graphic acceleration already present inside the 6500, namely the ATI Rage IIc card which is built-in to the motherboard.

don't expect too much from it though, i'm having problems with mine.

 

[madmax_2069]

all it does is it uses the ATI GPU chip (like a CPU) to make games run faster and smoother and look allot better. if you dont use 3d acceleration it uses what's called software rendering and everything has blocky textures runs slow and dont look as good.

i cant remember but i think it uses the rave API to use 3d acceleration. i dont think it supports openGL. i think there is a few more like 3dfx which you cant use cause you dont have a 3dfx voodoo accelorator card. i think there is one more but i cant remember.

any game you run if the video hardware is supported you have to select rave in the settings to be able to use it. if not its useing software rendering which will only use the video hardware only as a advanced video buffer and wont take advantage of the ability of the GPU.

 

[Quadraman]

Like Dan said, don't get your hopes up too much as to how fast your games will run or how good they will look. The video hardware built into the 6500 is poor by modern standards. A Radeon PCI might be a good idea if you're going to use a 6500 for playing games.

 

[madmax_2069]

nut running something like mechwarrior would probably benefit a bit from using it. it will still probably be a bit on the slow side but not as slow as software rendering would be

 

[Bunsen]

OTOH. those games should fang on any machine with a later ATI chipset/card }

 

[madmax_2069]

it does. i run it on my AIO with a Radeon 7000 with a G3 running at 466mhz. even the onboard Rage pro 6mb vram did real good

 

[Blessed Cheesemaker]

Got a software bundle from a 6500. Three of the titles say "3D Accelerated for the 6500". They are Mechwarrior2,Weekend Warriorand Virtual Pool. Is there a special card inside?

Well, I guess on one hand it means "Marketing Hype" (since the iPhone, I think we forget how pitiful the old hype used to be).

On the other hand, I know for a fact that with Mechwarrior, the special RAVE version gives you nifty cloud textures...same blocky graphics otherwise, but in the original Mechwarrior, with no acceleration, you didn't even get that...just blue sky. That is what your special Rage chip gets you (I believe it as actually 2MB!).

I'll keep on blabbing...I still love Mechwarrior...anyway, the special verson with the 6500 also is the already updated 1.2 version, so you don't have to go hunting around the net to upgrade it.

Hmmm...I wonder if I still have my copy of NetMech somewhere?....