Re: Object rendering with dynamic views

[davidf(at)dfanning.com (David Fanning)]

Mark Hadfield (m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz) writes:

> I think this area deserves a careful examination. (Thanks for volunteering
> Ben.) I suspect you will find that performance is important, but that the
> ranking of the different methods will vary widely depending on OS, graphics
> hardware, IDL settings and day of the week.

I think you forgot the phase of the moon. :-)

Cheers,

David

P.S. By the way, I had an interesting e-mail conversation
this week with someone producing object graphics pie charts,
of all things. She was very carefully cleaning up memory,
but when she ran her program in a loop it crashed consistently
on the 4th or 10th or 16th or whatnot iteration. :-(

What in the world!? 

Turns out it was the hardware renderer. This has gotten
to be so prevalent that my FIRST suspect in ANY object
graphics problem (especially those that would seem to
be completely unrelated) is to check the graphics renderer.
In my opinion you can only get predictable results using
software rendering.

-- 
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting
Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
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