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About ArcView 3D Analyst
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ArcView 3D Analyst Graphics Accelerator CardsWhat are OpenGL accelerator cards?OpenGL (Open Graphics Library)-is a graphics standard for displaying 3D graphics. It is a low level graphics library specification that makes available a set of geometric primitives — points, lines, polygons, images, and bitmaps. ArcView 3D Analyst takes advantage of this OpenGL technology for better performance. If an OpenGL accelerator card (or 3D graphics card for short) is present, the performance of 3D Analyst will be significantly improved. Each graphics card is composed of two parts, the hardware card itself and the software driver. The hardware card implements low-level OpenGL instructions. The software driver interacts between 3D Analyst and the hardware card. What is the difference between OpenGL cards?OpenGL cards vary greatly in cost and performance. There are three general categories of performance: low, medium, and high. Low or base-level cards provide some acceleration of rasterization (blending, hidden feature removal), frame buffers, and Z Buffers (keeping track of whether one part of a feature is closer to the viewer than another). Medium-level cards provide all the benefits of the low-level cards. In addition, they provide triangle setup (triangle data formatting and parameter setup). High-level cards provide all the benefits of the medium-level cards. They also provide geometry capability (transformation, clipping, and lighting). They perform all operations in their own memory space using their own drivers and technology. This provides the fastest display and highest quality. The cost of high-level cards is accordingly higher. |
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