🚀 go-pugleaf

On 16 Mar 98 14:19:10 GMT, "K Dunne" <kdunne@argo.net.au> wrote:
>From what I have read this is wrong. MMX needs to be called by MMX enhanced
>software. Wheras 3D and 3D+ will be activated and used atomatically
>whenever a game or application requires 3D rendering much the same way
>direct X uses your dedicated 3d card at the moment. If a game uses direct
>3d it will use the primary 3d card and or 3D 3D+ if it is available. The
>game should not need direct initialisation of 3D instructions as with MMX.
>Direct X will see the 3D 3D+  CPU determine if the game needs it and then
>use it.... 

	In truth it's actually somewhere in between.  To use the AMD
3D insturction set through DirectX, first the game obviously needs to
support DirectX, which most modern games do (at least those that are
likely to benefit from AMD 3D anyway), although not all of them.  But
more then that it must use DirectX to do the geometry setup, instead
of using a game-specific geometry setup stuff.  Now, you'd think that
this might be very common, as it should be easier to let an API do
geometry setup for you, but unfortunately it's quite tough to optimize
stuff for the Pentium(MMX) processor, and things have to be pretty
specific, so most (nearly all?) games currently availible do their own
geometry setup routines.  Unless a new version of these executables is
released then the AMD K6 3D won't get any boost from the AMD 3D
instruction set.  However it would seem that at least some game
developers will be releasing executables that let DirectX take care of
everything, and these games will see a definate improvement when used
with the K6 3D as opposed to a standard K6.

Anthony Hill            | Sig files?  SIG FILES?!  What the
hilla@uoguelph.ca       | hell do I need a sig file for?!