i'll dig into that mesa3d idea... thanks for pointing me there to. it's true that many mainstream gfx cards don't support even dx9c, but it's just a bit a pity that even simple 2d games do have an extreme low framerate while it would be possible with dx 7+ ten times faster. i was suprised that even a matrox g450 didn't support opengl that's why i was so scared that bmax based products can only be distributed to "high end" home users - not to modern standard office computers which would have enough power with a fallback to directx.