Getting ATi's FireGL to Work with Acad07

I was initially disappointed that the FireGL X3 graphics board (sent to me by ATi). It performed poorly with AutoCAD 2007. When set by the 3dconfig command to recommended values, the board fails in all four areas:

Geometry acceleration: Not recommended and off
Smooth line display: Not available
Gooch shader: Software emulation in use
Full-shadow display: Not available

After some back and forth, ATi set me up with one of their Professional Services tech support people. He quickly discovered that my computer had never enabled all of its AGP graphics. It had the AGP slot, but not the Intel driver that tells Windows how to access the slot for specialized graphics features.

Here's how to figure it out: run the dxdiag.exe program (from Start | Run). In the Display tab, check the setting for AGP Texture Acceleration. On my computer, it was set to "Not Available."

From the ASUS Web site (manufacturer of my computer's motherboard), I downloaded the Intel AGP driver, and then installed it. It required a reboot, following which DxDiag reported that ACP Texture Acceleration was enabled.

The Pro Svcs guy also told me to install the latest driver for the FireGL X3. This involves the following steps:

1. Download the new driver from ati.com (caution: their site is not fully compatible with Opera).
2. Uninstall the existing driver by removing it from the Hardware list.
3. Reboot the computer.
4. Windows is now in its annoying 640x480 VGA graphics mode. Install the new driver.
5. Reboot.

Upon launching AutoCAD and running 3dconfig, most features were enabled:

Geometry acceleration: Available and on
Smooth line display: Not available
Gooch shader: Available and using hardware
Full-shadow display: Available and on

But not all. Perhaps I can learn from ATI why smooth line display is unavailable.