BS Contact – Users Guide

The Direct 3D Tab

The Direct 3D tab allows allows tuning of low level Direct X renderer settings.

Direct 3D driver:

The type of Direct X 3D Render device used: Choices are depending on the 3D hardware:

Software: A software only rendering device.
This driver is the last-resort if no 3D harware is installed, the 3D hardware is mis-configured or there are no more 3D Resources (Because other 3D Applications are running.)

Hardware: Hardware accelerated Rendering

Hardware T&L: Hardware accelerated Rendering with Transform and Lighting done in Hardware. Normally this is the best mode. In case of highly dynamic vertex animated scene Hardware is sometimes more fluid.

Dither:

If the display is an a 16-Bit color mode, sets the frame buffer color dithering option.

Smooth textures:

Applies bilinear texture filtering so that textures are appearing smooth.

MIP-Mapping:

Applies Mip-Map filtering to textures and computes the scaled down mip-map levels for image textures.

Anti-Aliasing:

Enable full scene anti-aliasing. The scene is rendered at higher resolution and smoothed down for display. In the advanced Graphics Card Display Settings anti-aliasing and type of super sampling need to be enabled.

DX texture manager:

If enabled Texture memory is managed by Direct 3D. The amount of texture data fitting on the Graphics Card Video and/or AGP RAM is limited.
If the option is disabled Contact starts scaling down images in case the memory resources are exhausted.
With the option enabled Direct 3D manages memory (and swapping) possibly causing small delays for highly textured environments and using more overall memory.

Wait until frame ready:

Direct X tends to buffer rendering commands, so that rendering falls behind mouse movement.
This option is slowing down rendering by waiting on Direct X until a frame is finished.
For performance benchmarks this option should be switched off.

Use video memory:

Only used for Software rendering devices.

Fullscreen mode:

The fullscreen resolution mode. For TFTs it should match the native display resolution of the TFT.

Fullscreen device:

The Device used for fullscreen rendering if multiple display devices are available.

DirectX level:

The level of Direct X used, currently Direct X 7 is used.

The status lines below are showing Direct X Renderer information, and the amount of total and free video memory.

The settings can be tweaked for certain scenarios, like latest ATI/NVidia cards versus older cards with limited capabilities.

Quality Settings:
Enable: Smooth textures, MIP-Mapping, use Hardware T&L driver
Also: Enable Anisotropic Filtering in the Render options tab

Anti-Aliasing : Enable Anti-Aliasing in the Display Driver Settings

Settings for low end cards:

Use 16-Bit color display mode
Disable: MIP-Mapping, Anti-Aliasing

Settings if low on video memory or cards/laptops with few video memory:
Enable : use 16 Bit textures
Disable: MIP-Mapping

Reduce max texture size to 512 or even 256 in the Performance tab.

For Hardware troubleshouting the Microsoft DXDIAG program can be used (Start Menu -> Execute-> Enter dxdiag)

Often driver updates are helping in case of hardware problems.

Another point to check in case of problems are the AGP Bios seetings (AGP Memory size (64 MB / 128 MB), AGP Fastwrite On, AGP-Speed (AUTO 4x, 8x )