I have a 3D graphics card, but am getting poor graphics performance.

Most recently purchased machines come with a graphics card which directly supports 3D acceleration via the industry standard OpenGL. CabMasterPro not only takes advantage of this to deliver better performance, but for some of the advanced 3D features such as reflections, it depends on it. These would be too slow without hardware assistance. But many machines are shipped with graphics drivers that are just the basic Microsoft drivers and this stops you from being able to take advantage of the extended hardware features.

As a result, the 3D performs very poorly even though the machine specification looks like it should perform well. You will see this particularly when panning and zooming around to walk through a 3D scene in CabMasterPro using the mouse (the 3D repaints may not keep up where they should. Also, you will see jagged pixelated images where they should be smooth.

Good 3D graphics cards have hardware antialiasing support. This means that the pictures are sharper and clearer - the difference is enormous. If you have a good 3D graphics card and turn on its advanced features, you should be able to see a smooth clear image in full 3D and the machine should keep up with you when you pan, rotate and zoom so walk throughs are natural.

What graphics card do I have?

If you do not know which graphics card is installed on your machine, then right click on the desktop, select 'Show more options' and look at what graphics card is being used. The screens vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but look carefully and they should show you which manufacturer and model of graphics card is installed.

For nVidia cards, there is now support for reflections, provided you have the nVidia OpenGL 2.1 driver or later. This driver is now released by nVidia but does not work on older nVidia graphics cards. Check with the nVidia website to see if your card is supported... Nvidia

ATI or Omega Driver

For ATI graphics, recently purchased PCs will probably already have a current driver installed. Here is a summary of the steps to check the driver and if there is no ATI driver available, try the 3rd party driver from Omega. The Omega driver only applies to a machine with an ATI graphics card.

1. Check you are running an ATI driver already as follows.
   • Right click on the desktop, select 'Show more options' and look at what graphics card is being used.
     • If you see one of the ATI Radeon cards, then these instructions may apply. But you need to check further because your machine manufacturer may already have provided a current OpenGL driver for this card (i.e. at least OpenGL version 2.0) so check if this is the case by looking at the screens to find an OpenGL version number. If it is less than 2.0, you need to update.
     • First check your manufacturer's website and see if there is a later driver there. Some manufacturers do not keep up to date and only if this is the case, then you might want to proceed and update to the Omega driver as follows.
2. BEFORE INSTALLING, make a System Restore Point in case there are any problems.
   • To do this go to settings and search for 'Restore Point'.
     

     Example

     
   • Make a new restore point, typing in a comment like "Before installing OpenGL Omega driver".
   • If you have a severe problem later, you can then boot into Safe mode by pressing F8 during boot, and restore back to current state.
     If you are not confident about the recovery steps, please stop right now and let someone who is (such as your machine supplier) help you with the install.
3. The Omega driver can be downloaded by going straight to one of the download sites such as Ngohq .
   • Download and save this to your hard drive. Then run it to start the install.
   • The driver install will ask a few questions. For performance, when asked to turn Fast Writes on/off, say On.
   • Follow the on screen instructions to complete the driver install. It will then ask to reboot.
4. After rebooting with the new driver installed:-
   • Right click on the desktop, select 'Show more options' and you will be able to open the properties for the Omega driver - see example.
   • Click on the 3D tab;
   • Then click on the OpenGL radio button;
   • Then click on the Custom... button. See example.
   • Uncheck Application Preference for OpenGL as shown, then slide across to 6X.
     

     Example of Omega Controls

     
   • That's the main change, but you may also get some improvement from unchecking the Anisotropic Filtering checkbox and increasing that slider too.
5. Then press ok, and try running CabMasterPro.

Try panning, zoom and rotating a fully textured 3D scene using the mouse shortcuts to test the new performance.