Hardware Acceleration for 3-D Graphics

This section summarizes guidelines related to Microsoft Direct3D technologies that can be implemented as hardware acceleration features. Supporting the items in this section can result in improved performance and improved memory use.

For all PC 98 systems, the graphics subsystem needs to support 3-D acceleration because the new Internet Explorer 4.0 shell for both Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0 requires support for 3-D graphics. If 3-D acceleration capabilities are not available in the hardware, then it will be performed automatically in the software using Direct3D under both Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0.

System designs must include 3-D acceleration capabilities in the hardware when the target market for the system uses 3-D graphical applications. For example, all Consumer PC 98 systems should incorporate 3-D hardware acceleration because games and similar applications use demanding 3-D graphics.

Office PC 98 systems designed for use with CAD or graphics-design applications also require 3-D hardware acceleration. However, in these requirements it is assumed that the typical office system does not require hardware acceleration.

24. Hardware supports RGB rasterization

Consumer PC 98	Office PC 98	Entertainment PC 98
Required	Required	Required

In RGB mode under Direct3D, shading across a surface is accomplished by independently interpolating all color components. The following capabilities are required for red-green-blue (RGB) rasterization:

• Support 800 × 600 × 16 bpp at 75 Hz in full-screen, 3-D graphics mode.
  
  
• All required features available at the same time; for example, turning off specular highlights in order to enable fog is not acceptable.
  
  
• Flat and Gouraud shading.
  
  
• MIP-mapped textures.
  
  
• Bilinear or better filtered textures (rather than point-sampled), with perspective correction.