Does anyone know why checking on the "Allow Hardware Acceleration" toggle in DirectX (9) control panel prevents D3D from creating a valid device? D3D makes it look as though no display modes work. I'm using full retail mode with no debug output, with NVidia GForce 7300LE, on XP. After searching for problems with my graphice engine, I tried starting up Gears of War, and it encounters the same problem. Some type of hardware acceleration is obviously enabled with the setting turned off. Otherwise, the games I'm running would be unplayable. Does anyone know what the checkbox means, or why it's causing these problems?

I'm using the Nov 2007 SDK. I didn't realize there was a newer one out. Looking at the changes, though, there doesn't seem to be anything to be happy about.

Since they dumped the option off, I probably shouldn't be very concerned about it.. whatever it was supposed to do.

So it must have been replaced by the "software only" option in the 2008 SDK.

That would actually be a pretty useful feature, as long as it was named properly.

Thanks for the information, N2.