Setting Display Options

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Setting Display Options

Here you can set how Freecell3D appears. Depending on the capabilities of your graphics card, some of these feature may not be available.

Lighting

This sets the various lighting options that give Freecell3D atmosphere.

Light Type

You can choose between Ambient light that illuminates the whole table evenly, or Spotlight that places a lamp above the table casting a realistic bright spot on the center of the table.

Light Brightness

This controls the brightness of the Spotlight or Ambient lighting.

Texture Quality

This controls how the table and card graphics are stretched or reduced. There are three settings. Move the slider to the left if you are experiencing poor performance or display corruption on older graphics cards. The middle position should give the best combination of display quality and performance on most systems. The rightmost position is for advanced graphics cards (those which support anisotropic filtering in DirectX graphics); you might not notice any difference between this setting and the middle setting.

Advanced Options

Target Frame Rate

This is the number of times Freecell3D will try to draw the card table per second. A higher number looks better during card animations, but places a greater strain on the PCs processor and graphics card. A figure of around 40 is recommended for newer PCs with faster graphics cards, but good results can still be achieved with the figure as low as 10 on older machines. If you are unsure, set the value around 20.

Force Key Alpha

Selecting this can cure problems with the card corner transparency.

Force 16-Bit Textures

Select this option if you experience missing or corrupted textures, or if you experience texture-memory problems.

Software Render

This overrides your Graphics card's processor and renders the 3D scene using you PC's processor. You can use this option as a last resort if you graphics card does not draw properly with the latest drivers. You will notice a drop in performance especially on slower PCs. Try setting the card detail to medium or low and using point-and-click to move cards. You will also see better performance is you redusce the size of the Freecell3D window.

Optimize Hardware Rendering

Introduces optimizations that prevent the whole display from being re-drawn each time a card moves. This can improve performance significantly, but may lead to some graphical inconsistencies. If in doubt check this box, but uncheck it if you see display problems. (Note: the whole display can be refreshed manually by using the Refresh option on the View menu or pressing ctrl-R.


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Setting Card and Table Options

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