What the heck is 3d hardware acceleration?

[deathbyillusion]

Ok so im trying to play No Limits Coaster Simulator and I had and upgraded video card to begin with on my computer and It is doing the same thing as the new video card but when I went to go to the simulator part of the game where you can ride the coasters it say no 3d hardware acceleration found and the simulato skips and runs really slow. So I called Dell to once again ge a upgraded video card that was like 110.00 dollars that they said would fix the problem and run the game fine didnt fix the problem and I just wasted 110.00 dollars th video card is a VisionTek ATI Radeon 256M X1300SFF PCI-e. They dont know anything they suck and I hate Dell. There was problems with my computer before and I ew more about the problem then they did. Anyways what do I have to do to get 3d hardware acceleration.
i dont see the display setting in the control panel I have Windows Vista if that helps.
Nevermind I found it but it wont let me change the display setting in the troubleshoot tab.
Well my computr is a mini computer and it doesnt use full sized card slots and i dont know what size that one is and if it would handle my voltage cause they said that me computer had low power voltage.

[AboveAllElse]

See if your system has the 3D Acceleration slider all the way to the left. Its in Start > Control Panel > Display > Settings > under the troubleshooting tab. There will be a slider if its all the way to the left move it to the right to Full.

See if that works.

[Andy T]

$100 is way over-priced for a weak X1300 256M which goes about $50 as a fine eBay 2nd hand (I do not check full store price which should go about $70.

3D Acceleration is a must for anything that could consider modern. In this day and age it is saying you did not install video card driver; no driver might be fine for business or some clerical use but playing games without installing driver is as well as playing poker knowing full well you are going to lose.

Driver CD should be there accompanying the card. 3D Accel. is referring to the fact that all geometric processing is done by some hardware beside the CPU. This processing relates to the scene of a game.

In a simple words: you've been had; Dell is getting rid of an obsolete merchandize at your expense; an exponentially better Radeon HD 38xx could be had for $100.

[inconclusive_conjunction]

Are the drivers for the video card installed? That card should provide the "3D acceleration" that the game needs.

Drivers are here:

XP - http://www.visiontek.com/teksupport/drivers/8.1_XP_driver.html

Vista - http://www.visiontek.com/teksupport/drivers/8.1_Vista_driver.html