Feb 27, 2009

Antialiasing in 3D graphics

From documentation, this is a new feature in Mathematica 7.0:

“For 3D graphics, the operation of Antialiasing can depend on the particular graphics hardware you are using. Antialiasing is disabled unless Allow Antialiasing is set in the Preferences dialog.”

2

See the difference:

3

If you use a laptop with the integrated on-board  video, antialiasing in 3D may not be supported at all.

4 comments:

  1. AlfCSeptember 23, 2009 at 10:26 PM

    Any idea how to make it work in Linux (Ubuntu)? It has no effect on it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlfCJanuary 1, 2011 at 1:53 AM

    ok, answereing to myself. This options don't seem to have and effect in mathematica under linux. 3d video options are controlled by environment variables.
    For example, to force antialiasing one needs to set

    export __GL_FSAA_MODE=2

    before running

    mathematica

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMarch 5, 2011 at 4:25 PM

    Tried _GL_FSAA_MODE with 0 to 12, nothing changed.
    Script was
    ---
    #/bin/bash
    export __GL_FSAA_MODE=...
    mathematica
    ---

    Here's a nice document on what the FSAA settings should do on various GPUs, maybe it's useful for someone.
    ftp://download1.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/165.33.09/README/chapter-11.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownMarch 31, 2011 at 5:27 PM

    Anonymous from above here. I contacted the Wolfram Research support and got an answer that works on my machine.
    Here's a copy of the relevant part of the Email:
    ---
    Unfortunately, anti-aliasing is not officially supported in the Mathematica front-end on Linux at this time. However, you may be able to enable it by
    setting the MATHEMATICA_GL_FBO environment variable to 1. Here is how to do
    this in bash:

    export MATHEMATICA_GL_FBO=1

    This should work on most late-model NVIDIA GPUs, assuming that you are
    using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

    ReplyDelete