What is the best message to display if the user has Flash 11 but doesn’t have access to Stage3D? There’s several things that can make it so someone lacks hardware acceleration- either they’ve turned it off, their drivers are wildly out of date, or they never had it in the first place.

I’m mostly thinking of people on office computers and unrestricted Internet here.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

You can use this url http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/stage3d-unsupported-chipsets-drivers-flash.html to let them check if there grapics card is excluded and under the title “Recommended” you have some links of the main grapics card manufacturers to update the drivers

Most office people that only use browser and word wouldn’t understand anything from this but there isn’t a real alternative

You can check the View3D.stage3DProxy.usesSoftwareRendering property which will be true when the renderer has fallen back on software rendering instead of hardware accelerated rendering (GPU.) Note that it will only be set after a Context3D has been returned. When that happens, the proxy will dispatch a Stage3DEvent (CONTEXT_CREATED). So listen for that event and then check the property to make sure you get an accurate value.

Thanks for the link. As you say, it’s the less-than-expert-users that I’m thinking about here.

I thought it was best to check whether the Stage3D hardware mode was available manually before initialising any of the Away3D elements. There’s a good breakdown of what to check for here if anyone is wondering.

What I’m currently doing is displaying a message asking people to check their Flash settings and update their drivers, and then if they’re still seeing the message, directing them to an accessible version of the site and asking them to try again on a different computer.

The alternative is to create a low-poly version of the site that can be rendered by software, but I suppose the line has to be drawn somewhere.