Just wondering. I have my preview drawing set to OpenGL Hardware, but when I switch it over to SreeD software, I don't see much of a display quality difference at all. So why is OpenGL better? Is there supposed to be a difference in quality? Speed? What's so great about it? Thanks.

1st thing I noticed is that you can see figure hair and textures are scaled better. It will help in reducing surprises in a render. Not sure on drawing.

For me it's also just a tad faster (but i heard ATI's not the best for Open GL ;-)). Maybe with an Open GL card you'd see a greater difference.

I don't see any difference visually between the two - still can't see more than an outline of many hair figures, no matter how I set it. My problem with OpenGL is that whenever I move the mouse across the viewing pane, it greys out the areas. And stutters, and all kinds of disagreable things. SeeD works much better for me - but then, I've also got an Ati card, not NVidia.

"- still can't see more than an outline of many hair figures, no matter how I set it." You have to set the display property for the hair to texture shaded.

The toon shaded preview is worlds better. There are 5 toon styles. Further you can edit the the toon styles. They are in runtime:textures:toon Nerd3D

Display>Element style>Texture shaded...(for props) Display>Figure style>Texture shaded (for figures. Never looked better! A few more years and we'll get the shadows too.

It's a lot faster shen navigating the preview window on my Geforce 6800LE. And for some animations, especially toon-style, the OpenGL preview render looks good enough, which speeds up rendering an animation tremendously.

Import a background image, then change the size of the document window. It looks much nicer in OpenGL. SreeD tends to create unpleasant artifacts when the background is scaled.

Well no matter what opengl changes you wont ever get the results possible without a workstation card.And i have read about nvidia having better cards for opengl than ati but there gaming cards are still the best.But those cards can be expensive and arent really usable on games so you get stuck with something thats not double edged in a way.All i need is a athlon 64 maybe to get this program running really fast.I play games more than this but you think its worth giving up a radeon x800xt for games and buying a nvidia workstation card and only be able to make games?

The difference in gaming performance between the high end versions of the nVidia 6600 and ATI x800 is not much. Both are great game cards. When it comes to OpenGL support nVidia beats ATI hands down. Not only does the nVidia perform a lot better, it also supports quite a few OpenGL functions that crash on an ATI.

I've had loads of OpenGL problems on an ATI Radeon9600Pro, 128 Mb. Not nice if you want to work in Vue 4/5 or Poser 6. The older and slower Ti4200 in another workstation - yes, it is slower. But at least it works all the time. And the 6800LE in my newest workstation is a dream to work with in Poser and Vue, and also has very decent game performance.

I wouldn't advise buying an nVidia Quadra if you also want to play games. While its OpenGL performance and support is unsurpassed, it is definitely NOT very good as a gaming graphics card. Gaming performance is in the order of a Radeon9600, so you can forget about FarCry or Doom III. Edited to correct some typos.

Message edited on: 05/31/2005 15:05

Hmmm so your just saying if i really wanted to i could sell my radeon and get a geforce 6800 id have more luck with poser and what about say 3ds max or maya?Ive messed with those and had problems with the same video card.Well maybe its a good idea or not but id like to play games and use poser with no problems thanks i kinda knew this already but ignored it.So who wants a gigabyte radeon x800xt with a arctic cooler?