Are you talking Quake or Lightwave 3d and Boris GL?

Jsnkc's right. Normaly the 3d card doesn't help render, it just gives you a better preview. However, it could be used to render if a program could export the graphics data from the card to a file (like saving screenshots in a game).

But, CPU, hard drive speed (to a point), and RAM will effect 3d rendering mostly (note: memory will do more for how many objects can be rendered at once then how fast it's rendered)

I believe Ulead Cool 3D Studio takes advantage of your graphics card for rendering. So does Pinnacle Hollywood FX. I don’t know about the Boris products (I can’t afford them). The difference in Hollywood FX between software render and hardware render is significant. The new version of Hollywood FX (Version 5) requires a 3D card with 128MB memory! Since my nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 only has 64MB I’m staying at version 4.

So you should check the 3D application you plan to use and see if it will use a 3D card for rendering. I also use Cinema 4D CE and it uses OpenGL hardware acceleration but I’m not sure if it just uses it for preview of if it uses it for rendering too.

~jr

Graphics cards are mostly driven by the game market and rendering 3d graphics are what these games are all about. So the 3d render programs now can use the GPUs on the graphics cards to render 3d objects for video.

Panther uses them for rendering the desktop it seems, which means they can have a large amount of eye candy without it hogging the CPU.

Which reminds me, what happened to the next release of Doom?

I've been trying the trial download of ulead cool 3d. From what you say, it probably only uses the card for preview. That makes a lot more sense anyway, that the card is used for preview rather than being incorporated into the rendering process.
thanks