Technical Q&A QD3D91

RAVE Support for Apple 3D Accelerator

Q: How do I make my application work with the Apple Hardware card?

A: Your best bet is to call QuickDraw 3D, since it does all the right things. However, here's a list of some of the pitfalls of the Apple Hardware card.

1. You must explictly enable the engine using QAEngineEnable.

2. You can only create deep-z contexts, and must send triangles with correct z information.

3. Texture modulation and highlighting are always turned on, so you must set the texture colors even if you aren't using those texture ops.

4. The Apple hardware supports either twelve (12) 128x128x32-bit textures, or three (3) 256x256x32-bit textures, per frame. Textures cannot be deleted to make additional room for more textures. If you don't need texture wrapping, you can put combine smaller textures in a single larger texture, and calculate the appropriate u and v coordinates to choose the smaller texture.

5. It can render either to a GDevice or to a Memory Device. This hardware can render in single-buffered mode without tearing, so creating single buffered contexts will improve performance.

[Apr 20 1998]