AGS has two different graphics drivers when run on Windows -- DirectDraw and Direct3D.

DirectDraw is the 'classic' software graphics driver, that AGS has used ever since the initial Windows version was released. It's perfectly fine for simple games that don't use many large sprites, tinting or alpha blending. It's also quite fast at doing RawDrawing to the screen.

Direct3D is a new, hardware accelerated graphics driver. It uses the Direct3D 9.0 to render the game in a fully hardware-accelerated environment. This means that the game will run a lot faster if you use features such as alpha blending and tinting, which are quite slow to perform in software mode. However, with Direct3D doing RawDraw operations can be quite slow, and the driver won't work on all graphics cards.

No matter which you choose as your default graphics driver, the player can always run the Setup program and switch to using the other driver if they are having problems on their PC.

System Requirements

DirectDraw: any Windows-based PC with DirectX 5 or later installed
Direct3D: any Windows-based PC with DirectX 9.0 installed and a graphics card designed for DirectX 8.1 or later (most cards manufactured from 2003 onwards).

If you get the error message "Graphics card does not support Pixel Shader 1.4" on startup, this indicates that your graphics card is too old to run with the Direct3D driver. You should choose the DirectDraw driver instead.

See Also: System.HardwareAcceleration property