rec.autos.simulators

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Papyrus haven't used Direct3D in any of their previous sims (at least
not in the ones I'm aware of). This includes titles such as Nascar
Racing II, Nascar Racing 1999 and Grand Prix Legends. Nascar Racing 3
should support D3D cards, or so I'm told.

For TNT2 owners there is the Glide driver you can download for GPL,
but at the cost of a drop in frame rates, which is at least better
than using software rendering, which in GPL is unfortunately on the
verge of unplayable.

Yes, but doesn't answer the question.  The basic, simple, answer is that a)
Papyrus had lots of experience with Rendition, had some experience with
Glide from adding a patch for N2 and b) D3D when the meat of GPL was in
development really was horrid and a complete pain to work with.  And it
still is to some extent, though getting much better. The last is probably
the reason why they came up with an OpenGL patch for other card users when
they did.

If you mean the Creative Labs Unified driver?  Then I have yet to hear that
it actually worked with GPl.  However, if you have a TNT2 card, run the
OpenGL beta2 rasterizer available from www.papy.com and depending on your
system config and a bit of luck you should be able to get 36fps at 1024x768.

I should apologise for the typing error in my previous message which
said:

That was supposed to read: For TNT2 owners there is an 'OpenGL' driver
you can download.

I am a TNT2 owner. And there is absolutely on my system no decrease
in framerate.  The caveat is that there is an issue with the mirrors because
of a) how Papyrus implemented them in OpenGL and b) how Nvidia wrote
the drivers to handle those particular functions of OpenGL.  Right now, TNT2
Ultra and G400 are the best cards out for OpenGL AND Direct3D handsdown.

Slower systems?  It all depends.  All the current crop of cards, including
the
V3, perform better as you throw more CPU at them.  However, from what I can
glean from RAS posts the V3 does a good job all around on a variety of
systems
for GPL.  I definetly wouldn't recommend a TNT2 Ultra [unless you already
got
one] for a low-end system at all.