open GL.....??

[Toolman35]

I have a Guillemot maxi gamer video card w/ the voodoo banshee engine just downloaded TF update from half Life and noticed through the survey that 71% of people use open GL. It said I was using software rendering...what is that?? Can I change to open GL? Is it better? Thanks for the help..

[Orcmonkey]

Welcome to PC-MECH! Open-gl is one of the methods used by Half-Life for 3D acceleration. The others are Direct 3D and Software rendering. Open GL tends to give the best performance, but I don't think your card can support this mode. Direct 3D is more compatible, but doesn't look as good. Now, Software rendering is one that doesn't use hardware accerleration at all, and looks the worst. These are set at "Configuration>Video>Video Modes" I belive 3dfx cards like your banshee use an acceleration engine called GLIDE. I do not know if H-L supports this, but look around in the options and readme. The card is rather old, so you may consider upgrading to something like a Geforce 2/3/4 model (These run Opengl like BUTTER) I use a geforce 2 GTS and can get framerates in the high 90 FPS when playing Counter-Strike or what have you (hint: Type net_graph 3 in the console) Hope that cleared a few things up for you.

[Toolman35]

Thanks for the info orcmonkey. My machine is out of date anyway,guess it's a good time to build bigger and better