Display

Rhino’s display pipeline balances speed and beauty, displaying your models fast, how you want them, while you work.


Overview

Rhino’s display pipeline is fast and uses modern graphics hardware features, like GPU sensitive shaders and memory optimizations. This results in fewer GPU-specific display glitches and more consistent, beautiful, and frequent frames, even with large models. Features include extremely fast 3D graphics, unlimited viewports, shaded, working views, perspective working views, named views, floating views, full-screen display, draw order support, two‑point perspective, clipping planes, and one-to-one scale to view models at full size.

New in Rhino 7

Some models will display significantly faster in Rhino 7 on both Windows and Mac:

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    Files with nested blocks (often from SolidWorks®, STEP, and SketchUp® import). Polysurface, mesh, and extrusion objects inside nested blocks are cached for rapid display. Our test models have shown up to 10x performance improvement in wireframe and shaded modes.
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    Layouts with many detail views. Details in layout views are now cached as OpenGL® textures. These textures are reused when panning layouts and modeling in the layout view, resulting in faster panning and zooming.
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    Files with lots of text objects: Text now displays faster while it is being edited.

We’ve also added support for:

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    Gradient and Transparent Hatches: Gradient and Transparent Hatches make your illustrations, diagrams, schematics and any 2D representation more beautiful.
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    Display Transparency: All objects (surfaces, meshes, SubD, curves, text, points, hatches and text dots) pay attention to this transparency setting and attempt to draw with blending. (Vector output for printing, PDF, and SVG pay attention to this transparency as well).

Balancing Speed and Beauty

Rhino’s modern display pipeline scales to different OpenGL levels based on the capabilities of your graphics card. We are always refining Rhino to keep up with modern hardware and provide consistent and beautiful visuals across a broader range of GPUs. The results? For most graphics cards, fewer GPU-specific display glitches for more consistent, beautiful, and frequent frames.

Customizable Display Modes

Customizable viewport display modes produce stunning high-resolution output images at interactive frame rates.

Rhino Viewport Display Modes

Curves and Points

Curves are smooth and fast to draw. Points are displayed in beautiful detail.

Rhino Display Points

Rendered Display

Rhino’s Rendered display mode even has support for detailed, Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Materials…


Realtime Rendering

Rhino has a realtime Raytraced viewport mode…

…as well as realtime previews with SSAO, Decals, Image-based lighting, and screen- and world-based mapping.

Clipping Planes

Rhino supports viewport clipping planes in many of its display modes, allowing you to section your model while you work, even in visually rich modes like Rendered…


Color Balanced

Rhino’s display pipeline supports detailed color control, all the way down to per-face colors on objects…


What About My Graphics Card?

We put a tremendous amount of work into the display (OpenGL) pipeline. We hope it produces higher-quality frames, faster, across a wider range of graphics hardware, but we cannot guarantee performance improvements in all circumstances. The best way to gauge how it performs on your hardware is to test Rhino yourself with your models. For those seeking advice testing, please ask the Rhino community.