Sorry John, we sort of went of the rails here… I was only mentioning to Nathan (the developer of Raytraced mode), that I’m not getting any results in Raytraced mode for my current Radeon card…and although it is somewhat related to this thread, it has nothing to do with the problem you’re seeing.
I’ll try to get things back on track here…
There are very specific reasons for why things are the way they are in V6, and if you’re interested in the details, I’d be glad to provide them here (beware, this would be a short novel ).
For now, just know that older hardware has a very difficult time supporting newer features in newer versions of OpenGL that have been released after the video cards were released. With each new release of OpenGL, video card companies find it harder and harder to update drivers for older hardware, and eventually reach a point where they simply cannot implement something in the driver since the physical hardware just can’t support it…and so they stop releasing updates for specific products and/or series of GPUs. This is why I’m currently stuck with a driver from 2013 for the Radeon HD card I’m currently using…and that driver only supports OpenGL 3.3… The current OpenGL version is 4.6 …so you can already see a huge gap and loss in functionality
Since companies like AMD aren’t making new driver updates for certain models of cards, it also means they’re not fixing any bugs that may be discovered…so users are stuck with whatever the latest driver is for their specific card. Sometimes though, certain bugs can be worked around by the developers of the applications (like Rhino)… We figure out different ways to do the same thing, but do it in a way so as not to expose the known bug. However, there are times where even workarounds aren’t possible, and well, it is what it is.
Without going too far into the details…
In short… V5 uses about 1% of your video card (GPU), whereas V6 uses, on average, about 90% of your GPU at any given time…and the new Raytraced mode can use up to 100% of the GPU, 100% of the time, depending on the GPU make and model. V6 also makes extensive use of your GPUs memory… If Rhino can place something in GPU memory, it will… Meshes, Textures, Curves, Shaders (mini programs), … you name it. V6 relies so much on GPU memory now, that too little memory can actually be problematic.
It’s difficult to explain all of this in layman’s terms, and it’s difficult for users to understand hardware limitations, especially when V5 is working just fine for them… The bottom line is that V5 doesn’t push hardware limits at all, but V6 tries to push your hardware to its maximum…and sometimes, for some configurations (especially older ones) the maximum is simply not enough. We try to throttle back as best we can, but when throttling back means we eventually do what V5 does, then you’re not really getting any benefit in V6 over V5 in terms of the display and all of its new features and capabilities.
If you are able to upgrade your computer, then I highly recommend you do. I’m not going to give any specific video card recommendation…other than this:
Get a computer with as much memory as possible, using one of today’s latest and greatest video cards with as much GPU memory as possible… I would say that 4GB of video memory would be the minimum I would get given today’s standards (note: Your current video card only has 512MB). I’d also try to get one with as large of an SSD (hard disk) you can afford… You do that, and you’ll be able to experience all of what V6 has to offer, rather than battle with V6, trying to get it to work with or workaround certain hardware limitations.
In the mean time, I’m still going to keep at it here to see if I can actually get V6 working with this Radeon HD 3870.
Thanks,
-Jeff