Re: Object rendering with dynamic views

["Mark Hadfield" <m.hadfield(at)niwa.cri.nz>]

"David Fanning" <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote in message
MPG.14d6b47246375088989d28@news.frii.com">news:MPG.14d6b47246375088989d28@news.frii.com...
> 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.

That's very interesting.

I should think the root cause of a flaky hardware renderer would be a flaky
video driver. So once your correspondent might want to try tracking down &
installing the latest version of the video driver, then trying the hardware
renderer again.

I've never had any crashes related to the graphics renderer. I have found
the hardware renderer on my machine somewhat faster (no more than 2x) than
the software renderer. But I have (as I mentioned) pretty ho-hum graphics
hardware. I was just about to check these things out on my new PC but I
corrupted the hard disk! (I am too ashamed to tell the group how I did it.)

Doesn't IDL provide endless opportunities to tinker!

---
Mark Hadfield
m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz  http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield/
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
PO Box 14-901, Wellington, New Zealand