ATI Radeon Video Cards

Summary: Information about ATi Radeon video cards and their issues with Rhino.

• Panning
• Zooming
• Rotating

We have contacted ATi about this issue. ATi states that the FireGL line of cards are NOT intended for CAD applications like Rhino. The Radeon is intended for gaming, therefore reporting CAD-related problems against gaming cards is pointless.

Jeff LaSor, the Rhino display developer, has written a plug-in to address this problem. The plugin replaces Rhino's existing display engine with one that handles problems associated with the ATi HD series cards.

Download this plugin: http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/content/upload/files/RhinoDisplayEngine_OGLx.zip

UnZIP the file and either drag-n-drop it onto a Rhino viewport or use the PluginManager command to load it. Just to be safe, close and restart Rhino.

This work-around has been tested on HD series cards, but does not appear to be needed for FireGL cards. It will not effect other graphics cards.

You might experience some situations or problems we haven't anticipated, so please report any problems you encounter while using this plug-in to the Rhino newsgroup. or tech@mcneel.com.

Detail: The problem is that newer ATI drivers choke on a very basic OpenGL call that Rhino uses to capture framebuffer contents used in Rhino's double-buffering and triple-buffering mechanisms. The result was that as you rotated and panned the views, everything worked and performed great, but once you stopped, you would experience a long delay (about two seconds per viewport). This meant that operations that simply needed to refresh the display (e.g., selecting objects) would show long delays. This plugin fixes the problem by rewriting the framebuffer capturing mechanism. -Jeff

Note: The only way to disable this plug-in is to delete the .rhp file from your system.

OsnapTooltipFix

Page added 16-Oct-2008 by John Brock

Update: 28-Oct-2008. This fix also works on Rhino V4 installed on Vista 64-bit.