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NOTE: This Technical Q&A has been retired. Please see the Technical Q&As page for current documentation.

Limitations of the Apple QuickDraw 3D Acceleration Card

Q: What are the limitations of the Apple QuickDraw 3D Acceleration Card?

A: First, note that these limitations only apply the Apple QuickDraw 3D Acceleration Card as of March 1996. Future 3D acceleration technologies, either from Apple or other vendors, may not share these restrictions.

  • No more than 12 textures can reside in the card's memory at any one time.

  • The largest texture size is 256X256 pixels. If the texture is larger than this it will be shrunk and dithered down to 256x256.

  • Pixel-by-pixel transparency is not supported for textures.

  • Virtual Memory can adversely affect acceleration. We strongly recommend turning off Virtual Memory when using 3D Acceleration.

  • Acceleration only works if the monitor is set to display thousands (16 bit pixels) or millions (32 bit pixels) of colors.

  • The Apple QuickDraw 3D Acceleration Card is a PCI card, thus will only work in Macintoshes with PCI slots.

[Apr 08 1996]

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