Interface

On the Display Driver Selection dialog, options are unavailable if the corresponding driver is not installed on the system.

Nitrous (Recommended)

Selects the Nitrous graphics driver and viewport system. See the viewport configuration options, especially those on the Visual Style & Appearance panel, for a description of the capabilities of Nitrous.

Nitrous requires Direct3D 9.0 on an NVIDIA Quadro FX card, preferably FX4800, with an up-to-date video driver.

NoteThe Nitrous driver does not have a configuration dialog aside from the Viewport Configuration dialog.

Direct3D

If you have a Direct3D (D3D) driver installed on your system, you can use it for 3ds Max viewports. If you don't have DirectX 8.1 or above installed, this option is unavailable.

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, Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. There is no multiprocessor 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.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/directx/.

• Advanced Settings(Available only when Direct3D is the active option.) Click to open the Direct3D Driver Setup 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, open the Direct3D Driver Setup dialog, click Revert From Direct3D, and then choose the new driver from the Graphics Driver Setup dialog.

OpenGL

You can use the OpenGL driver if you're using any form of hardware acceleration. 3ds Max 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 might 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 OpenGL 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.)

Software

If you're using software rather than hardware acceleration, you can choose the Software display ("HEIDI") driver. The Software driver does not require a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU); however, it is not available for the 64-bit version of 3ds Max.