16 bits of precision?

[jarvis24]

Looking over the dxdiag info from the test machine, it appears that the Display Memory is coming up as "n/a" and the "video acceleration" and "ddraw status" are not known by the system. This has come up before with Optiplex systems in the past and in systems with the Intel chipset. We're working now with the IT folks at UTSA to see if we can get the system to be "aware" of its display hardware by installing a video card instead of using the onboard Intel chipsets. Hopefully, we will have some good news soon...

See also: http://www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?t=550

Btw, here are some of the relevant current DXDIAG settings for the Optiplex while using the Intel chipset:

Card name: Intel(R) 4 Series Internal Chipset
Manufacturer: Intel Corporation
Chip type: Intel(R) 4 Series Express Chipset Family
Display Memory: n/a
Video Accel:
DDraw Status: Not Available
D3D Status: Not Available
AGP Status: Not Available

[jarvis24]

Update:

After trying to update from the Intel Chipset to an ATI Radeon card, we still had the same issue--Windows was unaware of the the display hardware's status:

Highlights:

Card name: ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type: ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x95C5)
Display Memory: n/a
Video Accel:
DDraw Status: Not Available
D3D Status: Not Available
AGP Status: Not Available

It was clear that we would need Windows to know that DirectX was installed and
operating properly. We found a prior thread (also dealing with Optiplex systems) where a user describes a solution they found for this issue:

http://www.empirisoft.com/Support/showthread.php?p=9407

We followed to the instructions to change the registry key to "7" instead of "0" and after a reboot, the system recognized all the required DirectX components and DirectRT was able to start. Tomorrow, the lab will test the machines to see if their experiments can run now.

See also: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/191660

[UTSA-APL]

An update:
In our case we do not use Net Support on the system in question but we do use the Aclient from Altiris.
The fix seems to work for both remote tools (net Support and Altiris).
Thank you for all your help Blair!

[jarvis24]

Thanks for the update, glad to hear all is working well. -Blair

Note to other users, another helpful suggestion was offered here by a diferent user via email:

I had almost the exact same problem last year. The computers I bought had separate, fancy video cards, but Direct RT said that my card didn't support its video requirement. As it turns out, although the video card was installed properly, it wasn't the default video processor. So, all I had to do was update the driver for my display to the video card and my DirectRT problem was solved.