The Technology behind the Drivers

What games can I play?

Now there are a couple of requirements behind the technology, on the software side of things. First, the Elsa Revelator drivers currently work with Direct3D games only. Of course, this is still a huge number of games, like Tomb Raider 2 and 3, Forsaken, Half-Life, Incoming, Expendable, Need for Speed, Descent II and III, and many more. The only exception is the use of a third-party OpenGL wrapper, which is how we got Quake II working. (!)

There are some third-party OpenGL "wrappers" which lets OpenGL optimized games use Direct3D drivers for hardware acceleration. In this situation they were very useful, since we wanted to run Quake II, an OpenGL game, with the Revelator glasses.

Z-buffer

Also, the game has to use a z-buffer. This is not a problem for almost all games, which all utilize the z-buffer. The z-buffer value of objects (and thus the pixels that make up objects) determines how near or close the object is to the viewer, or the object's depth. The z-buffer value determines which objects can be seen by the viewer, because the z-buffer value of objects are compared to find out which objects (or pixels) are supposed to be in front of other objects. Thus, the z-buffer determines an object's depth, and whether or not objects are supposed to intersect, or have one object partially come through another one.

Thus, the z-buffer is important in the determination of 3D elements, and is needed for the Elsa drivers to properly display which objects are located at what depths in relation to the user. When using the 3D Revelators, then, the drivers can properly display which objects are meant to be in the back of the scene and which ones are meant to be out near your face! Only a handful of games don't support z-buffer use. The list that we've seen so far is only flight simulator games, like Microsoft FlightSimulator98, Microprose Falcon 4.0, and F22 Air Dominance Fighter. This is because flight simulators don't rely on depth of other objects, because you are meant to be in the sky!